by T. C. Boyle
She was dressed in moccasins and leggings, in fringed buckskin spotted with grease or ink or something, and her skin had a weird rufous cast to it, the color of old brick. Bits of feathers and seashells and whatnot dangled from her hair, which was knotted and tangled and so slick with grease she must have shampooed with salad oil. She had a box with her. A big cardboard supermarket box that bore the logo of a detergent guaranteed to brighten your shirts and socks and your mornings too. The box was overladen and she was balancing it on the apex of her swollen abdomen, waddling a bit, her lips molded in a beatific smile.
“Hi,” Walter said, straightening up and rubbing his hands together, as if crouching down in her driveway were the most natural thing in the world for him to have been doing. “Just, uh, checking to see if the beast was leaking oil again, you know?” he slurred, making it a question, an excuse and a plea all rolled in one.
Joanna acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Just kept coming, waddling, embracing the big box full of—what was it, dolls? “Hi,” Walter repeated, as she drew even with him, “need a hand with that?”
Now, for the first time, her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Oh, hi,” she said, her voice as tranquil and steady as if she’d been expecting him, “you startled me.” Her eyes were Mardi’s, but all the ice was melted from them. She didn’t look startled at all. In fact, if Walter didn’t know better, he would have guessed she was stoned. “Yes,” she said, dumping the box in his arms, “please.”
Walter took the box. Inside were dolls. Or rather, parts of dolls: heads, limbless torsos, the odd arm or leg with its molded sock and shoe affixed. Each of them—each face, limb, set of buttocks, belly and chest—had been slathered with some sort of paint or polish that made it look rusty, flesh gone the color of rakes left out in the rain. Walter clutched the box to his chest while Joanna fumbled through her rabbit-skin purse for the keys to the station wagon’s rear door.
It seemed to take her forever. Walter began to feel uncomfortable, standing there beneath the unwavering August sun in his stained pants and sweaty shirt, staring drunkenly into the heap of dismembered limbs, frozen smiles and madly winking eyes, and so he said, “For the Indians?” just to say something.
She took the box from him, gave him a look that made him wonder if she really had recognized him after all, then slid the box into the back of the wagon and slammed the door. “Of course,” she said, turning away from him to make her way to the front of the car, “who else is there?”
Next it was Lula.
She knew him now, of course, knew him well—he was the friend of her nephew Herbert and one of Mr. Van Wart’s executives. And a very special friend of Mardi too. She greeted him at the door with a smile that showed all the fillings in her teeth. “You look like you been run down in the street,” she said.
Walter gave her a sloppy grin and found himself in the anteroom, glancing first up the staircase to where the door to Mardi’s lair lay masked in shadow, and then to his left, where the comforting gloom of the old parlor was steeped in muted sunlight.
“Mardi’s upstairs,” Lula said, giving him a sly look, “and Mr. Van Wart’s out back someplace—poking around in the barn, I think. Which one you want?”
Walter was aiming for nonchalance, but the Scotch was drilling holes in his head and his feet seemed to have called in sick. He took hold of the banister for support. “I guess I came to see Mardi,” he said.
Only now did he notice that Lula was clutching her purse, and that a little white straw hat floated atop the typhoon of her hair. “I’m on my way out the door,” she said, “but I’ll give her a hoot.” Her voice rose in stentorian summons, practiced, assured and familiar all at once—“Mardi!” she called, “Mardi! Somebody here to see you!”—and then she gave him another great wide lickerish grin and ducked out the door.
There was a moment of restive silence, as if the old house were caught in that briefest hiatus between one breath and another, and then Mardi’s voice—querulous, world-weary, so shot through with boredom it was almost a whine—came back to him: “Well, who is it—Rick?” Silence. Then her voice again, faint, muffled, as if she’d already lost interest and turned away, “So send him up already.”
Walter was not Rick. Walter did not in fact know who Rick was, nor did he much care. Shakily, unsteadily, he lifted the stones of his feet, gripping the banister as if it were a lifeline, and mounted the stairs. At the top, Mardi’s door, first one on the right. The door stood slightly ajar, a garish poster of a band Walter had never heard of crudely affixed to the face of it. He hesitated a moment, staring into the hungry shameless eyes of the band’s members, trying out the ponderous flat-footed syllables of their esoteric name on his tongue, wondering if he should knock. The booze decided for him. He pushed his way in.
The room was as dark as any cave, a low moan of bass and guitar caught in the far speaker, Mardi, in the light from the door, hunkered over an ashtray in the middle of the bed. She was wearing a T-shirt and panties, nothing more. “Rick?” she said, squinting against the invasion of light.
“No,” Walter murmured, feeling immeasurably weary, vastly drunk, “it’s me, Walter.”
The light fell across her face, the wild teased bush of her hair. She lifted a hand to shield her eyes. “Oh, fuck,” she spat, “shut the door, will you? The top of my head feels like it’s about to lift off.”
Walter stepped inside and shut the door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, a moment during which the plaint of bass and guitar was amplified by the addition of a muddy quavering vocal track—some guy who sounded as if he were singing through his socks. From the bottom of a sewer. In hell. “Nice music,” Walter said. “Who is it—the guys on the door?”
Mardi didn’t answer. Her cigarette—or no, it was a joint; he could smell it—glowed in the dark.
He started for the bed, thinking to ease himself down on it, maybe take a hit of the joint, help her off with her T-shirt, forget himself for a space. But he didn’t quite make it. Something immovable—the beveled edge of her bureau?—caught him in the groin, and his foot came down hard on something else, something frangible, that gave way with a splintering crack.
Still Mardi said nothing.
“You got a headache?” he said, struggling for balance, bending low to reach for the near corner of the mattress, “is that it?” And then, mercifully, he was sinking into the mattress, off his feet at last and so close to her he could feel the heat of her body, smell her hair, her sweat, the least maddening essence of her secret self.
“I’m waiting for Rick,” she said, and her voice was strange, distant, as if it weren’t really plugged in. “Rick,” she repeated, in a murmur. And then: “I’m stoned, really stoned. I’m tripping. Seeing things. Scary things.”
Walter pondered this revelation for a minute, then confessed that he wasn’t feeling so hot himself. This, he hoped, would be the prelude to some meliorative embraces and consolatory sex, but his hopes were immediately dashed when she sprang up from the bed as if she’d been stung, stalked across the room and flung the door open. Her face was twisted with fury and the cold hard irises of her eyes contracted round the pinpoints of her pupils. “Get out!” she shouted, her voice rising to a shriek with the punch of the adverb.
The term “flipping out” came to him, but he didn’t know whether it properly applied to Mardi or himself. In any case, he got up off the bed with alacrity, envisioning a vindictive Depeyster taking the stairs two at a time to see what his most trusted employee was doing to his half-dressed and hysterical daughter in the darkness of her room. As he staggered toward her, though, all the hurts and dislocations of the day began to fester in him, and he stopped short to demand an explanation along the lines of I thought we were friends and what about last month when we … and then we…?
“No,” she said, trembling in her T-shirt, nipples hard, navel exposed, legs strong and naked and brown, “never again. Not with you.”
They were face to face now,
inches apart. He looked down at her: a tic had invaded the right side of her face, her lips were parted and dry. All of a sudden he was seized with an urge to choke her, throttle her, knead that perfect throat till all the tightness went out of it, till she dropped from his hands limp as a fish slapped against the gunwale. But in the same instant she shouted “You’re just like him!” and the accusation caught him off balance.
“Like who?” he sputtered, wondering what she was talking about, how he’d managed to put his foot in it in the space of two minutes, and even, for a second there, wondering who he was. He watched her closely, drunk but wary. She was swaying on her feet. He was swaying on his feet. Her breath was hot in his face.
“My father!” she shrieked, lunging into him to pound her balled hands on the drum of his chest. He tried to snatch at her wrists, but she was too quick for him. “Look at you,” she snarled, pushing away from him so violently he nearly lurched backward over the railing and plunged to the unforgiving peg-and-groove floor below. “Look at you, in your faggoty suit and fucking crew cut—what do you think you are, some kind of Shriner or something?”
“Mardi?” Depeyster’s voice echoed from the rear of the house. “That you?”
She stood poised in the doorway, drilling Walter with a look that tore through the last tattered rags of his self-esteem. “I’ll tell you what you are,” she said, lowering her voice as a bull lowers its horns for goring, “you’re a fascist just like him. A fascist,” she repeated, lingering over the hiss of it as if she were Adam discovering the names of things—fink, pig, narc, fascist—and slammed the door for punctuation.
Terrific, Walter thought, standing there in the empty hallway. He was footless, fatherless, loveless, his wife was living with his best friend and the woman he’d left her for probably felt better about Mussolini than she did about him. And on top of it all, he was sick to his stomach, his head ached and he’d nearly ripped the bumper off his car. What next?
Walter braced himself against the banister and turned to peer down the well of the staircase. Below him, at the foot of the stairs, in an old pair of chinos and a faded blue shirt that brought out the color in his eyes, stood Depeyster Van Wart—Dipe—his boss and mentor. Depeyster was working something in his hands—a harness or bridle, it looked like—and he wore a puzzled expression. “Walter?” he said.
Walter started down the stairs. He was forcing a smile, though the muscles of his face seemed dead and he felt as if he were either going to pass out cold or break down and sob—hard, soulless and free though he may have been. All things considered, he did pretty well. When he reached the last step, leering like a child molester, he held out his hand and boomed “Hi, Dipe,” as if he were greeting him from the far side of Yankee Stadium.
They stood a moment at the foot of the stairs, Walter losing all control of his face, the lord of the manor dropping the bridle—yes, bridle it was—to lift a hand and scratch the back of his head. “Did I hear Mardi?” he asked.
“Uh-huh,” Walter said, but before he could enlarge on this curt and wholly inadequate reply, Depeyster cut him off with a low whistle. “Jesus,” he said, “you look like hell, you know that?”
Later, over successive cups of coffee in the ancient cavernous kitchen that gleamed with the anachronisms of dishwasher, toaster, refrigerator and oven, Walter experienced the release of confession. He told Depeyster of Jessica and Tom, of his hallucination on the road, the defeat in his heart and his crazy confrontation with Mardi. Hunched over the bridle with a rag soaked in neat’s-foot oil, Depeyster listened, glancing up from time to time, his aristocratic features composed, priestly, supremely disinterested. He offered the encouragement of the occasional interrogatory grunt or interjection, heard him out and chose sides without hesitation. “I hate to say it, Walter”—he spoke in clean, clipped, incisive tones—“but your wife sounds like she’s gone off the deep end. I mean, what can you expect from a woman who could move into a shack that hasn’t even got electricity, let alone running water—and with a doped-up screwball like that Crane kid, yet. Is that stable or what?”
No, of course it wasn’t. It was irrational, stupid, a mistake. Walter shrugged.
“You made a mistake, Walter, forget it. We all make mistakes. And as for Mardi—well, maybe that’s for the best too.” Depeyster gave him a long look. “I admit it, Walter, I hoped that maybe you and her, well. …” He broke off with a sigh. “I hate to say this about my own daughter, but you’re worth ten of her.”
Walter blew the steam from his fifth cup of coffee and toyed with a wedge of peach cobbler. He was feeling better, the nausea held temporarily in check, his despair tempered in absolution. And he was feeling something else too, a sense that his moment of triumph and decision was hovering just in front of him: his life had come to a point of crisis, and now, he thought, still drunk but infused with a sort of alcoholic rapture, he was on the verge of release. “You know all those letters I wrote to my father?” he asked suddenly. “In Barrow?”
If Depeyster was caught off guard by the abrupt turn in the dialogue, he didn’t show it. He leaned back in the chair, dropping the bridle on the newspaper he’d spread out on the table. “Yeah,” he said, “what about them?”
“They never came back.” Walter paused to let this sink in.
“So you think he’s there, then, huh?”
“Uh-huh. And I want to go find out.” Walter raised the cup to his lips, but in his excitement put it down without drinking. “I’ve been saving my money. I’m going to fly up there.”
“Walter, listen,” Depeyster began, “that’s terrific, that’s great—but have you really thought about it? What if he’s not there and you waste all that time and money for nothing? How you going to feel then? Or what if he won’t see you? Or if he’s changed? You remember his problem with alcohol. What if he’s a drunk in the gutter? Look, I don’t want to discourage you, but don’t you think if he wanted to see you he would have answered your letters? It’s been what—eleven, twelve years? A lot can happen in that time, Walter.”
Walter was listening—Dipe was only trying to protect him, he knew that. And he was grateful to him. But he had to go. He hadn’t told Depeyster about the marker—he’d never have believed it was an accident—but the fact was that it was gone: blasted, obliterated, wiped out. There was nothing here that had a hold on him any more—not Hesh, not Dipe, not Mardi, Jessica, Tom Crane or Laura Egthuysen. The marker had started the whole sick cycle and now he’d completed it—the Van Wartville stage of it, anyway. There was nothing left now but to go find his father and bury the ghosts forever.
“I think you’re crazy,” Depeyster was saying. “You’re a strong smart young man, Walter, with a lot of good qualities and personal attractiveness. You’ve had some bad luck—terrible, rotten luck—but I say forget the past and look ahead of you. With what you’ve got you can go a long way—and I don’t just mean in my business, but in any business you want.” Depeyster pushed back the chair and went to the stove. “More coffee?”
Walter shook his head.
“You sure? You feel all right to drive?” Depeyster poured himself a cup and crossed the room to sit back down at the table. Outside the window, a solid unbroken monolith of shadow fell from the house to engulf the lawn and the rose garden at the foot of it. “I’m paying you a good salary, Walter—damn good, for a kid of your age,” Depeyster said finally. “And you’re worth every penny of it. Stick with me. It can only go up.”
Walter pushed himself up from the table. “I got to go, Dipe,” he said, a fearful sense of urgency on him, of things closing in.
At the front door, he turned to shake hands with him, so charged with emotion he felt as if he were leaving that moment for the penumbral wastes of the north, felt like a daredevil climbing into his barrel on the icy lip of Niagara. “Thanks, Dipe,” he said, nearly choking up, “thanks for listening and, you know, for the advice and all.”
“My pleasure, Walter,” Depeyster said, grinning his aristoc
ratic grin. “Be careful now, huh?”
Walter dropped his hand, and then, in the rush of his good feeling, said, “One other thing, Dipe—I’m going to need two weeks off. … I mean, if it’s not going to be a problem or anything.”
In that instant Depeyster’s face went cold. The look he gave Walter was the same look Hesh put on when he was challenged or disappointed. Confused, growing hot, already knowing the answer from the set of that face, Walter suddenly thought of the last time he’d seen Hesh, nearly a month ago. It was during dinner—Walter’s favorite, borscht, lamb chops and potato latkes, with sauerkraut and homemade apple sauce and lettuce from the garden—and Walter had mentioned his father—Truman—and Hesh had made some deprecatory remark. Well, you may hate him, Walter blurted, but Depeyster says—
At the very mention of Depeyster’s name Hesh had exploded, leaping up from his chair to pound his fist on the table, leaning over to rage in Walter’s face like a barking dog. Depeyster says, he mocked. Who the hell you think it was that raised you, huh? The bum that left you an orphan? This, this robber baron, this crook that puts all these ideas in your head—is he the one? What right does he have?
Hesh, Lola was at his side now, her slim blue-veined hand on the rock of his forearm, trying to restrain him, but he shook her off. Walter sat frozen in his chair.
Hesh rose up to his full height, his bald head flushed and his nose as red as the borscht in the bowl before him. His voice dropped an octave as he struggled to control it. When I got you that job at Depeyster Manufacturing it was through Jack Schwartz because I know him from all my life and I thought you could use some experience of the real world and maybe some money in your pockets … but this, this is crazy. The man is a monster, Walter, don’t you know that? A Nazi, a union buster. Depeyster this, Depeyster that. It was him that ruined your father, Walter. Know it. On the grave of your mother, know it.