by T. C. Boyle
He said nothing, but he was wearing a little smile now. One Bird’s great innocent bloomers floated on the breeze.
“You’re not sleeping with her,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”
He didn’t tell her anything. The smile spread.
“Because if you are …” she trailed off. “Jeremy,” she whispered, so softly, so passionately she might have been praying. “Jeremy.”
He took her hands. “I want to fuck you,” he said, “so bad.”
Later, after he’d led her away from the dumb show of those billowing bloomers and they’d wound up making love in a clump of milkweed behind Dick Fourtrier’s place, he answered her question. “I’m thinking things over, that’s what I’m doing,” he said.
“What things?”
“Boats.”
“Boats?” she echoed, as bewildered as if he’d said “pomeranians,” “sputniks” or “saxophones.”
Boats. He was giving up the cabin—at least until their son was born, and by the way, was she, uh—? No? Well, they’d keep trying. Anyway, what he wanted was a change of scene. All of this ancestral soil business was beginning to wear on him—he could feel the spirits of Sachoes and the first doomed Jeremy Mohonk pressing in on him, and he needed a break, something different, did she know what he meant? He thought he’d like to live on a boat—off his feet, off the land that was draining him day by day of the little strength he had left. He’d seen a ketch for sale at the Peterskill marina. He needed fifteen hundred dollars.
She didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. For one thing, her husband had a boat at the marina, and how could she visit Jeremy there without arousing suspicion? And for another, Indians didn’t live on boats. They lived in longhouses, in lodges and wickiups and tar-paper shacks, they lived on land. And why in God’s name would he want to spoil the setup they already had? The way it was, she could visit him any time the spirit moved her—through the woods, direct to his bed, a fifteen-minute walk that got her juices flowing and put the sparkle back in her eyes. No, she didn’t like it, but she gave him the money all the same. And now, in the grimmest month of her life, in the penultimate month of her pregnancy, in the dismal, disastrous October of a year of riots in the streets, assassinations and men on the moon, now, after two years of trysts in the secret swaying darkness of that damp and fishy boat, she knew why he’d done it—to get away from her, that’s why. To mock her. To punish her.
It was an old story, a sad story, and it went like this: three weeks ago, gravid, swollen with his child, weighed down by this alien presence within her and yet lighter than air too, she went to him, full of the future, wanting only to hold him, touch him, rock with him in the cramped bunk of the Kitchawank as it rode the translucent skin of the river. As usual, she parked in the lot of Fagnoli’s restaurant and took a cab to the marina, and as usual, she found him below decks, reading. (He was going through two or three books a day—anything from Marcuse, Malcolm X or Mao Tse Tung to James Fenimore Cooper and the fantasies of Vonnegut, Tolkien or Salmón.) On this particular day—she remembered it distinctly—he was reading a paperback with a cover that featured a busty half-clad woman cowering before a liver-colored reptilian creature with teeth like nail files and an unmistakable genital bulge in the crotch of his silver jumpsuit. “Hello,” she said softly, ducking low to avoid the insidious beam on which she’d cracked her head a hundred times in the past.
He didn’t return her greeting. And when she made as if to squeeze in beside him on the bunk—stooped awkwardly, the baby swinging like a pendulum—he didn’t move. She felt the boat lurch beneath her and she sat heavily on the edge of the bunk across from him, a distance of perhaps three feet in those cramped quarters. For a long while she just sat there, glowing, beaming at him, drinking in the sight of him, and then, when she felt she wanted him so badly she couldn’t take it another second, she broke the silence with a soft amiable inquiry: “Good book?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t even so much as grunt.
Another moment passed. The air coming down the gangway was cool, salt, smelling of the mélange of things that ran through the river’s veins—fish, of course, and seaweed. But other things too, things that weren’t so pleasant. Or natural. Who was it had told her they were dumping sewage upriver? She peered out the grimy porthole behind Jeremy and pictured the gray chop awash with human excrement, with toilet paper and sanitary napkins, and all at once she felt depressed. “Jeremy,” she said suddenly, and the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m going to leave Depeyster.”
For the first time, he looked at her. The hooded eyes she knew so well lifted themselves from the page and focused their green squint on hers.
“I don’t care what he thinks or my parents or the neighbors or anyone else either. Even if he won’t give me a divorce. What I mean is, I want to be with you”—she reached out to squeeze his hand—“always.” Now it was said, now it was out in the open and there was no turning back.
It was a subject he’d avoided. Strenuously. Assiduously. Even, it seemed to her, fearfully. Yes, he assured her, he wanted her to have his child. Yes, he wanted to live out on the river for a while, fishing, crabbing, doing odd jobs around the marina to pick up the little he needed to get by—a dollar here and there for used paperbacks, a carton of eggs, the occasional soft drink. And yes, he loved her (though the question really didn’t have any meaning, did it?). But she was another man’s wife and things were fine the way they were. Besides, he couldn’t see the future at all. Not yet, anyway, not yet.
But now it was out in the open and there was no turning back: she was going to leave Depeyster for him. “I could live here on the boat with you,” she went on, staring at the floor, the words coming in a spate, “and we could go upriver and dock at Manitou or Garrison or Cold Spring. Or maybe on the other side of the river—at Highland Falls or Middle Hope. I have some money, my own money, a trust fund my mother’s father set up for me when I was a girl, and I’ve never touched it, you know, thinking that someday—” but she couldn’t go on, because now, suddenly, unconsciously, she was looking into his face.
And his face was terrible. No longer the face of the stoic who could have posed for the frieze on the back of a nickel, nor even of the strange charismatic man who’d led her across the threshold of the bright little room at the Hiawatha Motel or taught her to slip through the woods like the ghost of a deer, it was the face of the raider, the avenger, the face beneath the raised tomahawk. He sat up. Shoved himself violently from the bunk and stooped over her, his back, shoulders, neck melding with the dark low rafters. “I don’t want you,” he said. “I don’t want your half-breed bastard, or your quarter-breed either.”
His face was in hers. She could smell the fish on his breath, the sweat dried in the armpit of his shirt. “Destroyer,” he hissed. “Usurper. She-wolf. Charity Lady.” He pursed his lips, almost as if he were about to kiss her, and held her with his fierce unstinting gaze. “I spit on you.”
The next morning, the Kitchawank was gone.
Depeyster’s voice—“Joanna! Joanna, get that, will you?”—came to her as if from another dimension, as if she were trying to conduct her life on the cold floor of the river and the current drove all the words down. “Joanna!”
It was the door. Children were at the door—she could see them through the window—dressed as witches, ghosts, imps, Indian braves, Indian princesses. A jack-o’-lantern leered from the corner, where her husband, who couldn’t have loved the tradition more were he a child himself, had set out a bowl of candy corn and Hershey’s Kisses. Numbly she rose from the chair, fought the tug of the current, and fumbled to open the door. Their voices piped around her, swallowed her up, and their ugly little paws clutched at the contents of the bowl she’d somehow managed to lift from the table and prop against the swell of her belly. Then they were gone and she was struggling up-stream to sink ponderously into the waiting chair.
“Joanna? Sweetheart?”
&nb
sp; She turned in the direction of his voice, and there he was, in silk hose and knee breeches, in a square-skirted coat with stupendous brass buttons, in buckled shoes and sugarloaf hat. “How do I look?” he said, adjusting the brim of his hat in the mirror over the mantelpiece.
How did he look? He looked like a refugee from one of Rembrandt’s group portraits, like a colonist, a pioneer, like the patroon who’d wrested the place from the Indians. He looked, down to the smallest detail, exactly as he looked each year for LeClerc Outhouse’s Halloween party. There was one year, a long time back, when he was still young and adventurous, that he’d dressed as Pieter Stuyvesant, pegleg and all, but ever after he’d been the patroon. After all, he told her, why fool with perfection? “You look fine,” she said, the words trailing from her mouth as if encapsulated in the little bubbles they used in the funny papers.
She was turning away, already falling back into the depths, when he surprised her. Awakened her. Crossed the room to resuscitate her, to lift her, fathom by fathom, from the depths. It began with the percussive release of a cork, and the touch of a cold long-stemmed glass. “A toast,” he proposed, and he was right there at her side, his voice as clear as if it were only air that separated them after all.
She looked up at him, numb, stiff as a corpse, all the weight of all those tons of water pressing down on her, and fought to lift her glass. “A toast,” she repeated.
He was beaming, grinning, crossing his eyes and licking his lips with the sheer crazy joy of it, and he bent to take her free hand and hold it till he had her full and undivided attention. When he spoke, he dropped his voice to parody the deep unctuous tones of Wendell Abercrombie, the Episcopalian minister. “To the memory of Peletiah Crane,” he said, holding his glass aloft as if it were a chalice.
So deep down was she, it took her a moment before she understood. “You mean, he’s … he’s dead?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” he crowed, and she thought he was going to kick up his heels and caper around the room like a goat. “Tonight. This afternoon. Just after dark.”
She couldn’t help herself. She looked at his face, his costume, the empty glass in his hand, and felt herself coming up for air. She didn’t stop to think about the propriety of it—this sudden joy at the news of the death of a fellow creature—because something was happening to her face, something that hadn’t happened in so long it was a novelty: she was smiling. There she was, giving back the joy and triumph on her husband’s face, her dimples showing, the light rising in her eyes.
“Marguerite just called,” he added, and then, in his excitement, he was down on his knees before her, sweeping off the antique hat and pressing his cheek to the bulge of her stomach. “Joanna, Joanna,” he murmured, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me, the baby, the property, the whole beautiful thing that’s happening to us. …” Under the circumstances, it was the most natural thing in the world to do, and she wasn’t even aware she was doing it: she took his face in her hands, held him to her, and bent to touch her lips to the crown of his head.
They finished the champagne. He sat at her feet, rocking back and forth over his glass, all the while chattering on about breeds and temperaments, about saddles, riding clothes and whether she thought they’d be able to find a good part-time groom and maybe a riding teacher too—for the boy, he meant. He was so ebullient, so full of the moment, not even Mardi could dampen his mood. She paraded down the hallway in her kitten costume (half a dozen mascara whiskers, a tail of twisted pipe cleaners and a leather corset so low-cut in front and pinched in the rear she couldn’t have worn it to the beach), and Joanna watched her pause at the front door, begging for a confrontation, but Dipe wouldn’t have it. He turned away as if he didn’t recognize her and went on with what he was saying even as the door slammed behind him. “Listen, Joanna,” he said, “I know this isn’t really your cup of tea and I know you’ve passed on it the last couple of years, but do you think you might want to come with me tonight?” And before she could answer, before she could think, he was running on, as if to forestall her objections: “You don’t even have to change if you don’t want to—you can go like this, like Pocahontas, like an Indian princess, and to hell with them. Your outfit’ll go great with this,” he laughed, plucking at the collar of the museum piece he was wearing.
It was then that she finally caught her breath, then that she felt herself shaking it off once and for all, coming up, up, till she broke free and filled her lungs to surfeit with the sweet, light, superabundant air. “No,” she said, her voice soft, yet steady, “I think I’ll change.”
Van Wartwyck, Sleeping and Waking
Following the events of that tumultuous summer of 1679, the summer that saw Joost Cats demoted, the adolescent Mohonk driven over the edge of the known world and Jeremias Van Brunt put once and forever in his place, the drowsy backwater of Van Wartwyck fell into a deep and profound slumber. Leaves turned color, just as they were supposed to, and fell from the trees; ponds froze over and the snow came, as usual, and then receded again. Cows calved and goats kidded, the earth spread its legs to receive the annual offering of seed, crops grew tall through the mellow months of summer and fell to scythe and mathook in the fall. Old Cobus Musser passed quietly out of this world and into the next one cold winter’s eve as he sat smoking before the fire, but no one outside the immediate family heard of it till spring, and by then it didn’t seem to matter all that much; Mistress Sturdivant found herself pregnant, but to her everlasting sorrow gave birth to a stillborn girl with a birthmark in the shape of a bat over the left breast, a tragedy she ascribed to the fright she’d taken on that terrible day at the patroon’s the previous summer; and Douw van der Meulen netted a one-eyed sturgeon longer than a Kitchawank canoe and so heavy it took three men to carry it. Still, discounting the carcass of the big fish itself, that was about it for the gossips to chew on through the long somnolent year that followed on the heels of that tantalizing summer.
It wasn’t until the winter of the following year, the winter of ’80-’81, that the community had occasion to rouse itself, if ever so briefly, from its torpor. That occasion was the arrival of the new patroon (i.e., the patroon’s cousin, Lubbertus’ boy Adriaen, with his napiform head and fat wet lips) and the coincident return of the green-eyed half-breed with his blushing Weckquaesgeek bride and quarter-breed son. Now, while Adriaen Van Wart wasn’t exactly patroon—Stephanus had long since bought out his cousin’s share of the estate—he wasn’t simply a caretaker either, as Gerrit de Vries had been before him. What he was, apparently, was a place marker, a pawn or knight or rook occupying a strategic square until the grand master chose either to sacrifice him or put him into play. What he was, beyond that, was a corpulent, slow-moving, baggy-breeched scion of the lesser Van Warts, born in the year of his father’s death and raised by his nervous, repatriated aunt in Haarlem (where his mother thought he would get a superior education and aspire to the directorship of the family brewery, but where in fact he became an adept only in the quaffing rather than malting of beer), who had now, enticed by his influential cousin, returned to the New World to make his fortune. What he was, was fat, eighteen, unmarried and stupid. His mother was dead, his sister Mariken living with her husband in Hoboken. Cousin Stephanus was all he had to hold onto, God and St. Nicholas preserve him.
And Jeremy?
Not yet seventeen, he was a married man, according to the rites and customs of the Weckquaesgeeks, and the father of a nine-month-old boy. He was healthy too, clean of limb and sharp of eye, and the native cuisine seemed to have agreed with him—he’d filled out through the chest and shoulders, and where before the sticks of his legs had merely melted into his torso, there was now the rounded definition of an unmistakable pair of buttocks. It seemed, however, that in his absence he’d totally lost the power of speech. What had begun as a predilection for taciturnity, or rather a disinclination toward noun, verb, conjunction, modifier or preposition, had developed into something aberrant during his sojourn among
the Weckquaesgeeks. Perhaps it was tiggered by some particularly caustic memory of his earliest days among that star-crossed tribe, days that suffered his mother’s dereliction and his own unending torment at the hands of his uniformly dark-eyed playmates. Or perhaps the cause was physical, something linked to the pathology of the brain, a failure of the speech centers, an aphasia. Who could say? Certainly not the good squaws and shamans of the Weckquaesgeeks, who had all they could do to stanch the flow of blood from the deluge of accidents that daily befell their clumsy constituency and barely noticed that the rehabilitated Squagganeek didn’t have much to say for himself. And most certainly not a physician such as the learned Huysterkarkus, who, if he’d been consulted, would no doubt have prescribed bleeding, cautery, emetics, purgatives and fen leeches, applied in random order.
At any rate, even if Jeremy had lost the power of speech, his prodigious return, coupled with the arrival of Adriaen Van Wart, gave the tongue waggers plenty of fodder over the next several months: To think that after all this time, and who didn’t know but that he was dead and disemboweled by the wild beasts and didn’t he have it coming to him, running off from the law like that? to think he’d show up on his uncle’s doorstep nice as you please, as if he’d been out for a stroll around the neighborhood or something. And with a woman at his side, no older than a child really, swaddled in greasy skins and stinking like the kitchen midden, and his own little half-breed bastard bound up in one of those papoosey baskets—or no, it’d be a quarter-breed, wouldn’t it? Couldn’t talk though, not a word. Goody Sturdivant says he’d forgot his Dutch and his English both, living up there amongst the heathens (like his mother before him, and wasn’t that a sad case?), taking part in their lewd and ungodly rites and who knows what all. Mary Robideau says they cut his tongue out, the savages, but who knows what’s true and what isn’t these days? And did you get a load of the patroon’s cousin—the one that’s going to sit by his big fat bachelor self up in the grand house? Yes, yes, that’s what I heard too—Geertje Ten Haer dressed her daughter up like a tart, the little one, not fifteen yet—shameless, isn’t it?—and came calling the very day the young bucket of lard moved his bags in. Oh, I know it, I know it. …