by T. C. Boyle
He unfolded the paper with a snort of contempt. The school board was a joke, he’d always detested Muriel Mott and in fact had hoped she’d be torn to pieces by hyenas at some remote blistering outpost, Fagnoli didn’t affect him and he routinely shot any dog he encountered on the property. As for the Russians, he’d always sided with his old commander, General George S. Patton, on that issue. But down toward the bottom of the page, a lesser headline caught his eye:
LOCAL MAN INJURED IN DAWN ACCIDENT
Walter Truman Van Brunt, 22, of 1777 Baron de Hirsch Road, Kitchawank Colony, was injured early this morning when he lost con trol of his motorcycle on Van Wart Road, just east of Peterskill. Van Brunt suffered a fractured rib and facial confusions in adition the to loss of his right foot. Burleigh Strang, of Strang Ferilizer, came upon the scene of the accident moments after blood all over the place,” Strang said, “and it was so foggy I darn near run him over myself.” Strang is crdited with saving Van Brunt’s life, who doctors at Peterskill Community Hospital say would have bled to
twelve people present. Dr. Rausch, Superintendent of Schools, addressed the problem of individual lockers for members of the girls’ field hockey
quick-thinking and laying him in the bed of his pickup truck and also remembering to bring the detached foot along in the hope that doc tors could save it. Van Brunt is listed in guarded condition.
Van Brunt. Truman Van Brunt. It had been years since he’d heard that name. Years. What was it, fifteen? Twenty? He looked up from the paper, and there in the kitchen, over the onion, the ham and the pinch of tribal dirt, Truman’s face suddenly materialized, just as it had been in 1949, on the night of the riot. The reddish dark hair freighted with sweat and clinging to his brow like a crown of thorns, blood dried at the corner of his mouth, his pale washed-out eyes—eyes the color of river ice—numb with shock. I’ve come for my thirty pieces of silver, he said, and then Joanna was there too, at the door, her smile wilting like a cut flower. She was young, her legs smooth and firm, the kimono clasped across her breast; she didn’t need any makeup. I beg your pardon? she said, and Depeyster was already rising from his chair. Ask him, Truman said, stepping through the doorway to point a finger stained with blood, and then he was gone.
Depeyster shook his head as if to clear it, and then, lifting the sandwich to his lips, fastened on the article again. Truman Van Brunt, he thought. Bad luck and trouble, nothing but. And now here was his son—just a kid—mutilated for life.
He read the article through a second time, then set the sandwich down and peeled back the top slice of bread. Bits of onion clung to the mayonnaise, which had begun to take on a pinkish cast through contact with the tomato. He peppered the whole thing with a talismanic sprinkle of cellar dust, glancing up just as his daughter, Mardi, sauntered into the room.
If she’d seen anything, she gave no indication of it—just slouched toward the refrigerator in a dirty housecoat, last night’s makeup ringing her eyes like greasepaint. She looked haggard, looked like a Harpie, a dope user, a wino. He supposed she’d been out all night again. He had an urge to say something, something sharp and wounding, critical, bitter. But he softened, remembering the little girl, and then, as she bent to peer into the bright depths of the refrigerator, marveling at this creature, with her bare feet and ropes of dark frizzed hippie hair, this bewildering adult, this woman, only fruit of his loins.
“Morning,” he said finally, giving it an ironic lift.
“You seen the orange juice?”
He considered this a moment, taking a judicious bite of his sandwich and patting his lips with a paper napkin. For a moment he caught the shrewd eyes and faintly bemused smile of General Philip Van Wart (1749–1831), whose portrait, by Ezra Ames, had hung beside the kitchen window since his death. “What about in the freezer?”
Mardi swung back the plastic door to the freezer compartment without comment. As he watched her snatch the garish container from the shelf and fumble with the electric can opener, he was suddenly seized with the desire to shake her, shake her till she woke up, cut her hair, stuffed her miniskirts and fishnet stockings in the trash can where they belonged and rejoined the community of man. So far as he could see, all she ever did was chase after a bunch of characters who looked as if they’d crawled out of some cave in New Guinea, espouse sexual liberation and freedom for the oppressed peoples of Asia at the dinner table and sleep till noon. She’d graduated from Bard in June and the closest she’d come to a career move since was an offhand comment about some bar in Peterskill: in the fall, when so-and-so left for Maui, she might be able to get a gig tending bar two nights a week. Nothing definite yet, of course.
Shake her! a voice raged in his head. Shake the piss out of her!
“You seen mom?” she murmured, overfilling the English scratched-ware pitcher. A vaguely yellowish liquid seeped from pitcher to counter, from counter to floor: drip—drip—drip.
“What?” he asked, though he’d heard her perfectly clearly.
“Mom.”
“What about her?”
“You seen her?”
He’d seen her all right. At dawn. Backing the station wagon out of the driveway for the trip up to Jamestown and the Indian reservation. The wagon was so overloaded with old shirts, rags, staved-in hats and odd-sized, out-of-fashion shoes that it had listed dangerously, like a foreign-registered freighter coming into port with a load of ball bearings. Joanna, her hair in curlers, had given a stiff, humorless wave and indicated that she’d be home the following day, as usual. He waved back, numbly. Anyone who’d seen them—he in his grandfather’s silk Jakarta dressing gown, standing there in the birdy hush of dawn; she, grim, makeupless and bland, wheeling out of the driveway atop her mound of trash—might have thought he’d just fired the maid or struck up a nefarious bargain with the Salvation Army. He glanced up at his daughter. “No,” he said. “I haven’t seen her.”
This information didn’t seem to have much effect on Mardi one way or the other. She drained a glass of juice, poured another and lurched toward the table, where she collapsed in the chair, glass clutched desperately in her hand, and made a peremptive snatch for the paper. “Christ,” she muttered, “I feel like shit.” It was the most communicative she’d been in recent memory.
He was about to inquire as to the cause and root of this feeling, as a way perhaps of drawing closer to her, commiserating with her, bridging the gap between the generations, when she lit a cigarette, and exhaling in his face, said: “Anything in this rag today?”
Suddenly he felt humbled, weary, a lip-speller in the presence of the Great Enigma. In his most inoffensive tone, generally reserved for fellow members of the Van Wartville Historical Society, he said, “As a matter of fact, there is. Down at the bottom there. A thing about the son of a man I used to know—a real hard-luck case—who had an accident last night. Funny, because—”
“Oh, who cares?” she snarled, pushing herself up from the table and crumpling the paper in her free hand. “Who gives a good goddamn about you and your old cronies—they’re just a bunch of Birchers and rednecks anyway.”
Now she’d done it. That urge to shake her, to slap some awareness into those smug lifeless eyes, seized him like a set of claws. He jumped to his feet. “Don’t you talk to me like that, you, you. … Look at yourself,” he sputtered, flying into a denunciatory harangue that savaged every aspect of her hippie credo, behavior and habits, from her grinding moronic music to her unwashed, unshorn tribal cohorts, and ending with a philippic on one of those cohorts in particular, the Crane kid. “Skinniest, dirtiest, unhealthiest-looking—”
“You’re just mad because his grandfather won’t sell you the precious property, aren’t you?” She sliced the air with the edge of her hand, as absolute and immovable as a hanging judge. “Is that all you can think about, huh? History and money?”
“Hippie,” he hissed. “Tramp.”
“Snob. Dirt-eater.”
“Christ!” he roared. “I was only tryin
g to make conversation, be nice for a change. That’s all. I used to know his father, this Van Brunt kid, that’s all. We’re two human beings, right? Father and daughter. Communicating, right? Well, I used to know this man, that’s all. And I thought it was ironic, interesting in a kind of morbid way, when I saw that his son had lost his foot.”
Mardi’s expression had changed. “What’d you say his name was?” she asked, bending for the paper.
“Van Brunt. Truman. Or, no, the son’s named something else. William or Walter or something.”
She was on her knees, smoothing out the newspaper on the threehundred-year-old planks of the kitchen floor. “Walter,” she murmured, reading aloud. “Walter Truman Van Brunt.”
“You know him?”
The look she gave him was like a sword thrust. “Not in the biblical sense,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”
Prosthesis
Walter was lucky.
Two weeks after his collision with history, he left Peterskill Community Hospital with a new plastic flesh-colored foot, courtesy of Drs. Ziss and Huysterkark, the Insurance Underwriters of Pensacola Corporation, and Hesh and Lola. Dr. Ziss, after three vigorous sets of early-morning tennis, had been called in to the emergency room to ensure safe closure of the wound. He debrided the damaged tissue, recessed tibia and fibula, brought down two flaps of skin and muscle for cushioning and sutured them together over the bone in a fishmouth closure. Dr. Huysterkark had appeared the following afternoon to provide hope and demonstrate the prosthesis. The Insurance Underwriters, in collaboration with Hesh and Lola, footed the bill.
Walter had been dozing when Huysterkark turned up; he woke to find the doctor perched on the edge of the visitor’s chair, the plastic foot in his lap. Walter’s eyes went instantly from the doctor’s patchy hair and fixed smile to the prosthesis, with its bulge of ankle and indentations meant to delineate toes. It looked like something wrenched from a department store mannequin.
“You’re awake,” the doctor said, barely moving his thin, salmon lips. He wore a scrub coat and two-tone shoes, and he had the air of a man who could sell ice to the Eskimos. “Sleep well?”
Walter nodded automatically. In fact, he’d slept like a prisoner awaiting execution, beset by irrational fears and the demons of the unconscious.
“I’ve brought along the prosthesis,” Huysterkark said, “and some”—he’d begun to fumble through a manila folder—“supporting materials.”
Though Walter had graduated from the state university, where he’d studied the liberal arts (a patchy overview of world literature, a seminar on circumcision rites in the Trobriand Islands and courses in the history of agriculture, medieval lute-making and contemporary philosophy with emphasis on death obsession and existentialist thought, to mention a few of the highlights), he was unfamiliar with the term. “Prosthesis?” he echoed, his eyes fixed on the plastic foot. All at once he was seized with panic. This obscene lump of plastic, this doll’s foot, was going to be grafted in some unspeakable way to his own torn and wanting self. He thought of Ahab, Long John Silver, old Joe Crudwell up the block who’d lost both legs and his right forearm to a German grenade in Belleau Wood.
Intent on the folder, Huysterkark barely glanced up. “A replacement part. From the Greek: a putting to, an addition.”
“Is that it?”
Huysterkark ignored the question, but he lifted his eyes to pin Walter with a look of shrewd appraisal. “Think of it this way,” he said after a moment. “What if your body was a machine, Walter—an automobile, let’s say? What if you were a Cutlass convertible? Hm? Shiny, sleek, right off the showroom floor?” Walter didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to talk about cars—he wanted to talk about feet, about mobility, he wanted to talk about the rest of his life. “Chances are you’d run trouble-free for years, Walter, but as you accumulate mileage something’s bound to give out sooner or later, you follow me?” Huysterkark leaned forward. “In your case, let’s say one of the wheels goes bad.”
Walter tried to hold the doctor’s gaze, but he couldn’t. He studied his hands, the sleeves of his hospital gown, the crease of the sheets.
“Well, what do you do? Hm?” Huysterkark paused. The foot sat like a stone in his lap. “You go down to the parts store and get yourself a new one, that’s what.” The doctor looked pleased with himself, looked as if he’d just announced a single cure for cancer, heart disease and yaws. “We’ve got it all here, Walter,” he said with a sweep of his arm that took in the whole hospital. “Eyes, legs, kneecaps, plastic heart valves and steel vertebrae. We’ve got mechanical hands that can peel a grape, Walter. In a few years we’ll have artificial kidneys, livers, hearts. Maybe someday we’ll even be able to replace faulty circuits in the brain.”
There was no breath in Walter’s body. He could barely form the question and he felt almost reprehensible for asking it, but really, he had to know. “Can I—I mean, will I—will I ever be able to walk again?”
The doctor found this hilarious. His head shot back and his smile widened to expose a triad of stained teeth and gums the color of mayonnaise. “Walk?” he hooted. “Before you know it you’ll be dancing.” Then he dropped his head, crossed his legs and began reshuffling the papers; in the process, the foot slid from the lap, fell to the floor with a dull thump and skittered under the chair. He didn’t seem to notice. “Ah, here,” he said, holding up a photograph of a man in gym shorts and sneakers jogging along a macadam road. The man’s leg was abbreviated some six inches below the knee, and a steel post descended from that point to a plastic, flesh-colored ankle. The whole business was held in place by means of straps attached to the upper thigh. “The la Drang Valley,” the doctor said. “An unfortunate encounter with one of the enemy’s, uh, antipersonnel mines, I believe they call them. I fitted him myself.”
Walter didn’t know whether to feel relieved or sickened. His first impulse was to leap from the bed, hop howling down the corridor and throw himself from the window. His second impulse was to lean forward and slap the therapeutic smile from the doctor’s face. His third impulse, the one he ultimately obeyed, was to sit rigid and clench his teeth like a catatonic.
The doctor was oblivious. He was busy fishing under the chair for Walter’s foot, all the while lecturing him on the use and care of the thing as if it were a hothouse plant instead of an inert lump of plastic manufactured in Weehawken, New Jersey. “Of course,” he said, as he straightened up, the recovered foot in hand, “it’s no use fooling yourself. You are now deficient”—he paused—“and will experience some loss of mobility. Still, as things stand, I believe you’ll find yourself capable of just about the full range of your previous activities.”
Walter wasn’t listening. He was staring at the foot in Huysterkark’s lap (the doctor unconsciously juggled it from one hand to the other as he spoke), a sense of hopelessness and irremediable doom working its way through his veins like some sort of infection, feeling judged and condemned and at the same time revolting against the unfairness of it all. Old Joe had the Huns to excoriate, Ahab the whale. Walter had a shadow, and the image of his father.
Why me? he kept thinking as the doctor played with the alien foot as if it were a curio or paperweight. Why me?
“No, no, Walter,” Huysterkark was saying, “in point of fact you’re actually very lucky. Very lucky indeed. Had you hit that sign a bit higher and lost the leg above the knee, well—” His hands finished the thought.
The sun was sitting in the treetops beyond the window. Out there, along the highway, people were going off to play tennis, shop for groceries, swim, golf, rig up sailboats at the Peterskill Marina or stop in for a cold one at the Elbow. Walter lay amidst the stiff white sheets, frozen with self-pity, beyond repair. But lucky. Oh, yes indeed. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
The night before, after Hesh and Lola and Jessica had left and the anesthesia had begun to let go of him, Walter had a dream. The pale glow of the corridor faded into mist, the whisper of the intercom was translated to the
lap of dirty water at the pilings, the tide running out, the smell as keen as everything that has ever lived and died upon the earth. He was crabbing. With his father. With Truman. Up at dawn, traps flung in the trunk of the Studebaker, bait wrapped in newspaper, walking out along the Acquasinnick trestle where the river opens up at high tide to flow all the way up Van Wart Creek. Stay off the tracks, his father warned him, and Walter stared into the mist, half-expecting the 6:20 from Albany to break free of the morning and tear him in two. But that would have been too easy. This dream was subtler, the payoff more sinister.
The bait? What was it? Fish gone high, covered with flies. Bones. Marrow. Chicken backs so rotten your hand would stink for a week if you touched them. When people drowned in the river, when they lay pale and bloated in the muck, pinned beneath a downed tree or the skeleton of a car, when they began to go soft, the crabs got them. His father never talked of it. But the neighborhood kids did, the river rats did, the bums who lived in the waterfront shanties you could see from here—they did. Anyway, maybe the 6:20 went by with an apocalyptic roar that felt as if it would rip the trestle from the pilings, maybe it didn’t. But Walter pulled at the line and the net was stuck, wouldn’t budge. His father, smelling of alcohol, a cigarette clenched between his lips and eyes squinted against the smoke, set down his beer to help him. Work it easy, he grunted. Don’t want to snap the line. Then it was free, rising toward him, as heavy as if it were filled with bricks.