by T. C. Boyle
Tom. The name came at him out of nowhere, out of another universe, and he barely heard it. Victims. Dreamers. He fought down her arms and jerked at the sweater like a clumsy magician trying to pull the tablecloth out from under a service for eight. She cried out. Flailed her arms. Fell back against the table. Beads scattered, falling to the floor like heavy rain, like the drumbeat of the polluters marching off to war. He tugged the sweater up, bunched it in an angry knot beneath her chin and lifted her from the chair, pinning her groin to the edge of the table with the weight of his own. He went for her mouth, but she turned away from him; he went for her breasts, but she hung on to the sweater with both hands. Finally, he went for her jeans.
She cried the whole time, but she clung to him. And he leaned into her and felt her tongue and when she stiffened against him she held fast to him as if he were her life and her all. When it was over he pulled back from her and the look in her eyes frightened him. She looked whipped, wounded, like a dog that’s been fed and beaten at the same time. Was that a bruise under her left eye? Was that blood on her lip? He didn’t know what to say—he’d run out of words. In silence he zipped up, buttoned his jacket; in silence he backed away from her and felt for the door.
Slowly, tentatively, as if he were facing down a wild beast that might spring at him if he glanced away for even an instant, he turned the knob behind him. It was then that she let herself fall to the floor, lifeless as a doll. She lay there, motionless, her head cradled in her arms, the jeans down around her ankles. He couldn’t hear her sobs now, but the balled white length of her was trembling with them, that much he could see.
It was his last picture of her.
Coming down the hill was nothing. He seemed to skate on his feet and each time he lost his balance a stiff young sapling sprang up for him to latch hold of. He squeezed his mind as he might have squeezed a blister, and purged himself of the image of her. By the time he reached the bridge he was in Barrow, with its unfathomable shadows, its hard edges, its geometry of ice. He saw his father there, and his father was healthy and vigorous, the man who’d taken him to the trestle to plumb the murky river for crabs, the man who’d stood up to Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and all the rest. Walter, his father said, it’s been a long time, and he held out his arms.
Costumes
She was a good-looking woman, a beauty, what with her expensive teeth, her full proud bosom, the flat abdomen that had grown round only once to contain the swell of life. He liked her eyes too, eyes that were like the marbles he’d won as a boy, the palest cloud of violet in a prism of glass, and he liked the way she looked at him when he was telling her things. He told her about Manitou’s big woman or Mishemokwa the bear-spirit or about his father and Horace Tantaquidgeon, and she leaned forward, her lips parted, brow furrowed, eyes so intent she might have been listening to the oracle, to the father of nations, to Manitou himself. But what he liked best of all about her was that she was a white woman, the wife of the son of his ancient enemy—that was too perfect.
He’d first met her up there, in Jamestown. What was it—four, five years ago? He was tired of the shack, tired of carrying the burden of his hopeless race, tired of solitude, and he’d gone north to pick apples and shoot duck for a couple of weeks—till Thanksgiving, maybe. Till the lakes froze and the ducks were gone, anyway. It was November, the Tuesday before Turkey Day, and he was sitting out on One Bird’s porch with a rag, a can of 3-In-One oil and One Bird’s hoary single-shot Remington. He’d used it the day before to bring down a pair of canvasbacks and a pintail, and he’d cleaned and oiled it after supper. He wasn’t really cleaning it now—he was just stroking the barrel with a rag soaked in oil, just to have something to do with his hands. The day was clear, breezy, with a scent of the tundra on the wind.
The station wagon—it was a Chevy, brand-new, white, with that fake wood business along the side—surprised him. It came around the corner by Dick Fourtrier’s place, muscling its way over the washboard dirt and the potholes, and then slowed in front of One Bird’s, jerking to a halt finally just down the road. On came the back-up lights, and the wagon lumbered back till it was even with him. He saw a head bob in the window, saw the wind tug at the exhaust. The morning locked itself up in silence. Then the driver’s door fell open and there she was, Joanna, the charity lady, coming around the side of the car in her leather pumps, her cashmere sweater and pleated skirt, coming up the flagstone path with its hackles of stiff yellow weed, coming to the house that needed paint, coming to him.
“Hello,” she said when she was halfway up the walk, and her smile gave back the glory of all those years of six-month checkups and all those miles of dental floss well-plied.
He was stoic, he was tough, he was an ex-con, a survivor, a man who lived off the land, a communist. His own teeth were rotten as a hyena’s and he was wearing work pants, a flannel shirt and a vest that had once been sky blue in color but was now smeared with grease, blood, steak sauce, the leavings of rabbit, pheasant, fish. He watched her with cold green eyes and he said nothing.
She stopped at the foot of the porch, her smile just the smallest bit strained, and she clasped her slim hands together and began twisting a ring round her finger—a diamond, of the type that proclaimed her the property of another man. “Hi,” she said, reiterating the greeting, as if he might not have heard her the first time, “can you tell me where I might find the social hall?”
The social hall. He wanted to sneer at her, shock her, hurt her, wanted to tell her she could look for it up her ass for all he cared, but he didn’t. There was something about her—he couldn’t say what—that set her apart from the others, those blue-haired old loons with their ratty blankets and their bibles and the rest of their do-goody claptrap, and it frightened him. Just a bit. Or maybe it wasn’t fright exactly—it was more of a frisson, a jolt. He just couldn’t picture her waving a placard (Save the Poor Ignorant Downtrodden Native American!) with the rest of them or slipping into a cheery barbecue apron and serving up flapjacks and sausage links at one of those horrific charity breakfasts.
She was a good-looking woman, of course—young, too—but that wasn’t it. There was something else here, something deeper, something that was coming to him like a gift, like a birthday cake with all the candles aglow. He didn’t know what. Not yet. It was enough to know it was there.
Since he’d said nothing, merely dug into her with those insolent eyes and dropped the barrel of the gun between his legs, rubbing it up and down as suggestively as he could, she went on, her voice a little jumpy, talking too fast now: “It’s my first time. Here, I mean. I’m from downstate, in Westchester, and Harriet Moore—she’s a friend of my cousin from Skaneateles—well, to make a long story short,” tossing her hair to indicate the wagon behind her, “I’ve got a load of stuff that we collected in the Peterskill area—cranberries, canned peaches and yellow beans, and—and gravy mix—for the, for you, I mean—no, I mean for your people and …” she trailed off in confusion, the green gaze too much for her.
He stopped rubbing. A wedge of geese called out from half a mile up. She glanced over her shoulder to where the car sat at the curb, still running, the door flung open wide, and then turned back to him: “So can you tell me where it is?”
For the first time, he spoke: “Where what is?”
“The social hall.”
He set the gun down on the newspaper spread out to protect the weathered boards of the porch, then rose from his chair to tower over her. And then he grinned, rotten teeth and all. “Sure,” he said, coming down off the steps to stand there and catch the scent of her, “sure I know where it is. I’ll take you there myself.”
He had sex with her that night, after she’d unloaded her dusty cans of succotash and anchovy paste and whatever other garbage the good wives of Peterskill had found cluttering the dark recesses of their cupboards, sex that necessarily involved some damage to underwear that looked as if it had just come off the shelf at Bloomingdale’s. He tore it from her on t
he bed of her sanitized room at the Hiawatha Motel, where everything—chairs, bureau, mirror frame, even the TV cabinet—was constructed of Lincoln Logs, painstakingly fit, glued and shellacked by reservation squaws for fifty cents an hour. It was a decor designed to give you that woodsy feeling, that half-naked, tomahawk-thumping, mugwump-in-his-lodgehouse sort of feeling. In Jeremy, however, it produced a very different feeling. One that made him want to tear the underwear from charity ladies.
Joanna surprised him, though. He’d expected prim, he’d expected blushing and beautiful, the averted eye and the trembling flesh. But she wasn’t like that at all. She was hungry, needful, more savage than he. Once he’d heard her name, once he’d unraveled the threads of her identity—“Van Wart?” No, it can’t be? Depeyster Van Wart, son of the old man, old Rombout?”—he knew he’d have her, that it was destined to be, that this was the gift wrapped specially for him, and he knew that he would humiliate her, ravage her, fill her right up to the back of the throat with all the bitterness of his fifty-five bleak and hopeless years. But she surprised him. The more brutal he was, the more she liked it. She came at him, lashing, lacerating, leaving marks on his back, and the whole thing turned on him. He backed off. Gave in. Fell, for the first time in his life, in love.
He waited for her, every other week, for the station wagon laden with rhinestone-encrusted handbags, golf clubs, Caldor sneakers, with wood-etching sets, men’s overcoats, galoshes, and took her directly from the social hall to the motel. He never confessed to her how much he hated the place, how much he resented it. But after a month or two, after he’d overstayed his welcome at One Bird’s, and Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone, he told her that the Hiawatha Motel made him sick. But it wasn’t just the motel, it was the whole godforsaken, fenced-in, roped-off disease of the reservation itself. It was One Bird. The Tantaquidgeons. The whole thing. It stank.
They were walking the banks of the Conewango after making love, she in the fringed buckskin jacket and leggings he’d given her for Christmas, he in his work pants and flannel shirt and the new down vest she’d given him in return, and she stopped him with a tug of her arm. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean it’s time for a change. I’m going back to Peterskill.”
Her face went strange for a moment, and he could see that she was trying to fit the idea into her scheme of things, trying to place her wild aboriginal lover in the tranquil picture of her Peterskill, alongside her husband, her daughter, the big galleon of a house that rode the sea of all those perfect lawns in an unbroken chain of perfect days. Then she shrugged. Reached her face up to his and kissed him. “Fine with me,” she said. “I’ll be able to see you all the more.”
And so he packed up his things—underwear, socks, moccasins, the rude garments he’d fashioned from hides and that he wore only on his native soil, Ruttenburr’s book, the gutting knife—while One Bird offered her opinion of the charity lady with the glass eyes, and then he climbed into the station wagon beside Joanna and rode in comfort over the creeks and hills he’d crossed on foot for the first time so many years before. He gazed out the window on the Allegheny, the Cohocton and the Susquehanna rivers, on the timber-lined mounds of the Catskills, on the plunging dark drop of the Hudson’s gorge. Then they were over the Bear Mountain Bridge, through the outskirts of Peterskill and heading east on Van Wart Road, and he felt like Hannibal coming into Rome, like a conquering hero, like a man who would never again know defeat.
Joanna coasted right on by the big house on the ridge, past the historical marker that had his name on it—Jeremy Mohonk, the woeful, the ancient, cut down for his trespasses against the almighty patroon—and pulled off on the shoulder across from the path that ran down into the pasture below. “Later,” he told her, and he slipped like a ghost into the ranks of the trees, invisible the moment he turned away from her.
She came to him in that cheerless shack, and she brought him food, books, magazines, she brought him blankets, kerosene for his lamp, cooking utensils, dishes, fine linen napkins that bore the Van Wart monogram. Life was good suddenly and he embraced it like a man risen from the dead. He trapped and hunted, he visited with Peletiah Crane and his gangling grandson, he sat by the stove on a cold afternoon and turned the pages of a book. And he waited, patient as a mogul, for Joanna.
A year went by, and then another. In the spring of the third year, things began to change. As winter let go and the sap began to flow in the trees, as he sat mesmerized by the trill of the toads or watched the May flies swarm to the surface of the creek, the old ache came back to him, the ache that could never be salved. What was he doing? What was he thinking? She was a good-looking woman, Joanna Van Wart, but he was the last of the Kitchawanks and she was mother to everything he despised.
“Throw it away,” he told her when she came to the door of the cabin that afternoon, beautiful in shorts and halter top and with her hair the color of all the leaves in the fall.
“Throw what away?”
“Your diaphragm,” he said. “The pill. Whatever it is that comes between us.”
“You mean—?”
“That’s right,” he said.
He wanted a son. Not the son One Bird could never give him, nor the infinitude of sons he’d spilled in his hand in the dark hole of Sing Sing—that was impossible. He would settle for another sort of son, a son who had less of the Kitchawank in him and more of the people of the wolf. This son would be no blessing, no purveyor of grace or redemption. This son would be his revenge.
At first she thought she’d leave Depeyster for him, that’s how strongly she felt. She really did. Jeremy was a kind of god to her. He made love to her, rough and tender at the same time, and it was as if the earth itself had become flesh and entered her, as if Zeus—or no, some dark Indian god, some brooding son of Manitou—had come down from his mountaintop to take a mortal woman. He was nearly twenty years older than she, and his life was a legend. He was her mentor, her father, her lover. He was all and everything. She wanted him inside her. She wanted to celebrate him, worship him, she wanted to lie against him and listen to his ragged voice become the pulse of her heart as he sifted through the old stories as if fingering jewels.
Was she obsessed? Besotted? Swept away? Was she a sex-starved middle-aged charity lady in a string of pearls who went wet in the crotch at the thought of him, who wanted to hump like a dog, like a squaw, like an Indian princess with an itch that wouldn’t go away?
Yes. Oh, yes.
She sat at the dinner table with her passionless husband and her vacant daughter while a black woman bent over the hereditary Delft-ware with a medallion of veal or a morsel of lobster and she wanted to touch herself, wanted to get up from the table and take to the woods howling like a bitch in heat. Lady Chatterley? She was a nun compared to Joanna Van Wart.
Of course, all things have their season, and all things must come to an end.
Looking back, she saw now that the beginning of the end was as clearly delineated as a chapter in a book. It came on that spring afternoon two and a half years back, just before he left the cabin for good, the afternoon he told her to throw away her diaphragm and give him a child. That was life. That was nature. That was how it was supposed to be.
The only problem was that he’d turned strange on her. They came together, flesh to flesh, invigorated by a new sense of purpose and hope of fulfillment, ecstatic once again, and it lasted a week. If that. Next thing she knew, he was gone. She came to the cabin early, to surprise him, and he wasn’t there. He’s fishing, she thought, he’s checking his traps and he’s lost track of the time, and she settled in to wait for him. It was a long wait. For he’d gone back to Jamestown, back to One Bird.
After a week—an interminable week, an eternal week, a week during which she neither slept nor ate and haunted the cabin like one of the unappeased spirits that were said to brood over the place in never-ending torment—she loaded up the station wagon with eighteen cartons of Happy Face potholders and c
ame looking for him. She found him on One Bird’s porch, shirtless, a necklace of polished bone dangling from his throat, the terrible freight of his years caught in the saraband of his scars, in the sullen slump of his shoulders, in the reptilian gaze of his eyes. He was cleaning fish and his hands were wet with blood. He looked as savage in that moment as any of his savage ancestors. But no more so than One Bird, all two hundred fifty pounds of her, who sat glaring at his side.
Joanna was unimpressed. She jerked the station wagon to a halt out front, flung open the door and tore up the path like an avenging demon. She was wearing the leggings, the jacket, the rawhide shift, and she’d darkened her skin with bloodroot till it was the color of a penny scooped from the gutter. Half a dozen strides and she was on him, her nails sunk like talons in the meat of his arm, and then she was leading him down the steps and around the corner of the house, oblivious to the unbroken skein of One Bird’s threats and insults. When she got him out back, out behind the drooping clothesline hung with One Bird’s gently undulating sheets and massive underdrawers, she flogged him with the sharp edge of her tongue. She began with the bloodcurdling philippic she’d rehearsed all the lonely way up Route 17, and ended with a rhetorical question delivered in a shriek so keen it would have driven eagles from their kill: “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing? Huh?”
He was twice her size, and he looked down on her out of the green slits of his eyes. “Cleaning perch,” he said.
She gave it a minute, rocking back on the balls of her feet, and then she lashed out and slapped him. Hard. So hard the tips of her fingers went numb.
Just as quickly, and with twice the force, he slapped her back.
“You bastard,” she hissed, her stony eyes wet with the sting of his blow. “You’re leaving me, is that it? To live up here with that—that fat old woman?”