“Truman,” Hesh said, and it was both a plea and a warning.
Walter knew.
And then he saw it. Behind his father, behind the pale, shorn, washed-out man in the bum’s suit of clothes, stood a motorcycle. A little pony Parilla, 98cc, red paint and chrome, gleaming like a puddle in the desert. “Come here, Walter,” his father said. “Come to your father.”
Walter glanced up at the man he knew as his daddy, the man who’d fed and clothed him, who’d stood by him through his traumas, there to throw the ball and catch it, to cow his teachers and subdue his enemies with a glance, to anchor and protect him. And then he looked out at the man on the lawn, the father he barely knew, and the motorcycle that stood behind him. “Come on, I won’t bite.”
Walter went.
And now here he was again, come back after eleven years, come back the second time that day. Only now he was black, a solid presence, with a pair of red-rimmed eyes and a nose that looked as if it had been stepped on. Now he was leaning through the window of the Pontiac and lighting a cigarette off Hector’s joint and reaching out to take Walter’s hand in a soul clasp and inquire as to how the fuck he was doing, man. Now he was Herbert Pompey, denizen of South Street bars, poet, player of the cornet and nose flute, part-time Man of La Mancha hoofer, weekend doper.
Sick with history, the past coming at him like a succession of screaming fire trucks, Walter could only tug weakly at Pompey’s hand and murmur something to the effect that he was doing okay but that he had a headache, he was feeling pretty stoned and thought he might be having a little trouble with his eyes. And his ears. And come to think of it, maybe his brain too.
There followed an interval during which Pompey joined them in the big airship of the Pontiac’s interior—Hector, Mardi and Walter in front, Pompey stretched out across the back seat with a pint of Spañada that had appeared in his hand as if through the intercession of spirits—an interval during which they communed with the tinny rattle of the radio, the texture of the night, a greenish blur in the sky that might have been a UFO but was probably a weather balloon and the great starry firmament that stretched out over the hood of the Pontiac like a sea of felt. Gravity tugged at Walter’s lower lip. The neck of the Spañada bottle loomed up on his right, the joint on his left. He was numb as a corpse. The attack of history was over.
It was Mardi who came up with the idea of swimming out to the ghost ships. An idea that had sounded far better in the conception than the execution. “It’s fantastic,” she insisted, “no, no, it’s really fantastic,” as if someone were contradicting her. And so they were, Walter, Mardi and Hector (Pompey had wisely chosen to stay with the car), swimming out to the black silent shapes that lay anchored in thirty feet of water off Dunderberg Mountain.
Stroke, kick, stroke, kick, Walter chanted under his breath, trying to remember if he was supposed to breathe with his head above the surface or beneath it. He was thinking about water sports. Scuba. Water polo. Jackknife. Dead man’s float. He was no slouch: he’d done them all at one time or another, had dunked heads and hammered goals with the best of them, swum rivers, lakes, inlets, murky primeval ponds and chloraseptic pools, a marvel of windmilling arms and slashing feet. But this, this was different. He was too far gone for this. The water was like heavy cream, his arms like spars. Where was she?
She was nowhere. The night fell on him from the recesses of space, shearing past the immemorial mountains, the oaks and tamaracks and hickories, melding finally in a black pool with the chill, imp-haunted river that tugged at him from below. Stroke, kick: he could see nothing. Might as well have his eyes closed. But wait—there, against the flat black keel of the near ship, wasn’t that her? That spot of white? Yes, there she was, the little tease, the bulb of her face like a night-blooming flower, a beacon, a flag of truce or capitulation. The keel rose behind her like a precipice, bats skittered over the water’s surface, insects chirred and somewhere, lost in obscurity, Hector floundered like a fish in a net, his soft curses softened by the night until they fell away into infinity.
Walter was thinking of how Mardi had shucked the paper dress in the gloom of the shore as casually as if she were undressing in her own bedroom, thinking of the thrill that had lit his groin as she steadied herself against him to perch first on one leg and then the other as she slipped off the paper panties and dropped them in the mud. Ghostly, a pale presence against the backdrop of the night, she’d disappeared into the grip of the water before he’d had a chance to yank his shirt off. Now he concentrated on the milky blur of her face and paddled toward her.
“Hector?” she called as he glided up to her. She was trying to shimmy up the anchor chain, gripping the cold pitted steel with naked flesh, hugging it to her, swaying above the surface like the carved figurehead that comes to life in legends.
“No,” he whispered, “it’s me, Walter.”
She seemed to find this funny, and giggled yet again. Then she dropped back into the water with a splash that could have alerted all the specter sailors of all the ships of the fleet—or, at the very least, the watchman she’d been jabbering about all the way over in the car. Walter clutched the anchor chain and peered up at the ship that loomed above him. It was a merchantman from the Second World War like the others beyond it, ships of the mothball fleet that had risen and fallen with the tide twice a day since Walter was born. Their holds were full of the grain the government bought up to keep free enterprise from strangling the farmers of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Below them, somewhere in a pocket off Jones Point, lay the wreck of the Quedah Merchant, scuttled there by William Kidd’s men in 1699. Legend had it that you could still see her when the river cleared, full-rigged and ready to sail, still laden with treasure from Hispaniola and the Barbary Coast.
But Walter wasn’t after treasure. Or rotting wheat germ strewn with rat turds, or even some good clean healthy exercise. In fact, until he brushed against Mardi in the water beneath the taut and rusted anchor chain, he wasn’t sure what he was after. “Surprise,” she gushed, bobbing up beside him, one arm on the chain, the other flung around his neck. And then, pressing her body to him—no, rubbing against him as if she’d suddenly developed some sort of subaqueous itch—she murmured, “Is it really your birthday?”
He’d almost forgotten. The sad censorious faces of Jessica, Lola and Hesh passed in quick review, a sudden manifestation of a larger affliction, and then he was grabbing for her, seeking orifices, trying to kiss, nuzzle, grip the anchor chain, tread water and copulate all at once. He got a mouthful of river and came up coughing.
Mardi made a soft, moaning, lip-smacking noise, as if she were tasting soup or sherbet. Wavelets lapped around them. Walter was still coughing.
“Listen, birthday boy,” she whispered, breaking away and then pulling close again, “I could be real nice to you if you’d do something for me.”
Walter was electrified. Hot, eager, bereft of judgment. The chill, fishy current was as warm suddenly as a palm-fringed Jacuzzi. “Huh?” he said.
What she wanted, bobbing there like a naiad in the turbid ancient Hudson in the late hours of the night and with the great high monumental V-shaped prow of the ship hanging over her, was derring-do. Heroics. Feats of strength and agility. What she wanted was to see Walter hoist himself up the anchor chain like a naked buccaneer and vanish into the fastness of the mystery ship, there to unravel the skein of its secrets, absorb the feel of its artifacts and memorize the lay of its decks. Or something like that. “My arms are too weak,” she said. “I can’t do it myself.”
A tug moved by in the distance, towing a barge. Beyond it, Walter could make out the dim lights of Peterskill, hazy with distance and the pall of mist that hung over the river’s middle reaches.
“Come on,” she prodded. “Just take a peek.”
Walter thought about the presumptive watchman, the penalties for trespassing on federal property, his fear of heights, the crapulous, narcotized, soporific state of his mind and body that made every movement
a risk, and said, “Why not?”
Hand over hand, foot over foot, he ascended the chain like a true nihilist and existential hero. What did danger matter? Life had neither meaning nor value, one lived only for personal extinction, for the void, for nothingness. It was dangerous to sit on a sofa, lift a fork to your mouth, brush your teeth. Danger. Walter laughed in the face of it. Of course, for all that, he was terrified.
Two-thirds of the way up he lost his grip and snatched at the chain like a madman, twelve pints of blood suddenly pounding in his ears. Below, blackness; above, the shadowy outline of the ship’s rail. Walter caught his breath, and then continued upward, dangling high above the water like a big pale spider. When finally he reached the top, when finally he could snake out a tentative hand and touch skin to the great cold fastness of the ship’s hull, he found that the anchor chain plunged into an evil-looking porthole sort of thing that might have been the monstrous, staved-in, piratical eye of the entire ghostly fleet. He leaned back to take in the huge block letters that identified the old hulk—U.S.S. Anima—hesitated a moment, then twisted his way through the porthole.
He was inside now, in an undefined space of utter, impossible, unalloyed darkness. Bare feet gripped bare steel, his fingers played along the walls. There was a smell of metal in decay, of oil sludge and dead paint. He worked his way forward, inch by inch, until shadows began to emerge from the obscurity and he found himself on the main deck. A covered hatch stood before him; above rose the mainmast and cargo booms. The rest of the ship—cabins, boats, masts and cranes—fell off into darkness. He had the feeling of perching on a great height, of flying, as if he were strolling the aisles of a jetliner high above the clouds. There was nothing here but shadows. And the thousand creaks and groans of the inanimate in faint, rhythmic motion.
But something was wrong. Something about the place seemed to rekindle the flames of nostalgia that had licked at him throughout the day. He stood stock-still. He drew in his breath. When he turned around he was only mildly surprised to see his grandmother perched on the rail behind him. “Walter,” she said, and her voice crackled with static as if she were talking on a bad long-distance connection. “Walter, you’ve got no clothes on.”
“But Gram,” he said, “I’ve been swimming.”
She was wearing a big sack dress and she was as fat as she’d been in life. “No matter,” she said, waving a dimpled wrist in dismissal, “I wanted to tell you about your father, I wanted to explain. … I—”
“I don’t need any explanation,” a voice growled behind him.
Walter whirled around. It had been going on all day—yes, from the moment he’d opened his eyes—and he was sick of it. “You,” he said.
His father grunted. “Me,” he said.
The eleven years had wrought their changes. The old man seemed even bigger now, his head swollen like something you’d find carved into the cornice of a building or standing watch over an ancient tomb. And his hair had grown out, greasy dark fangs of it jabbing at his face and trailing down his neck. The suit—it seemed to be the same one he’d been wearing on Walter’s eleventh birthday—hung in tatters, blasted by the years. There was something else too. A crutch. Hacked like a witching stick from some roadside tree, still mottled with bark, it propped him up as if he were damaged goods. Walter glanced down, expecting a gouty toe or a foot bound in rags, but could see nothing in the puddle of shadow that swallowed up the lower half of his father’s body like a shroud.
“But Truman,” Walter’s grandmother said, “I was just trying to explain to the boy what I told him all my life. … I was trying to tell him it wasn’t your fault, it was the circumstances and what you believed in your heart. God knows—”
“Quiet down, Mama. I tell you, I don’t need any explanations. I’d do it again tomorrow.”
It was at this point that Walter realized his father was not alone. There were others behind him—a whole audience. He could hear them snuffling and groaning, and now—all of a sudden—he could see them. Bums. There must have been thirty of them, ragged, red-eyed, drooling and stinking. Oh yes: he could smell them now too, a smell of stockyards, foot fungus, piss-stained underwear. “America for Americans!” Walter’s father shouted, and the phantom crowd took it up with a gibber and wheeze that wound down finally to a crazed muttering in the dark.
“You’re drunk!” Walter said, and he didn’t know why he’d said it. Perhaps it was some recollection of the early years, after his mother died and before his father disappeared for good, of the summers at his grandparents’ when his father would be around for weeks at a time. Always—whether the old man was asleep on the couch, helping his own father with the nets, taking Walter out to the Acquasinnick trestle for crabs or to the Polo Grounds for a ballgame—there had been the smell of alcohol. Maybe that’s what had done it tonight, at the Elbow. The smell of alcohol. It was the cipher to his father as surely as the potato pancakes and liverwurst were ciphers to his sadeyed mother and the big-armed, superstitious woman who’d tried to fill the gap she left.
“What of it,” his father said.
Just then a little man with a gargoyle’s face stepped out of the shadows. He wasn’t wearing the sugarloaf hat or pantaloons—no, he was dressed in a blue work shirt and baggy pleated trousers with side pockets—but Walter recognized him. “No drunker than you,” the man said.
Walter ignored him. “You deserted me,” he said, turning on his father.
“The boy’s right, Truman,” his grandmother crackled, her voice frying like grease in a skillet.
The old man seemed to break down then, and the words caught in his throat. “You think I’ve had it easy?” he asked. “I mean, living with these bums and all?” He paused a moment, as if to collect himself. “You know what we eat, Walter? Shit, that’s what. A handful of this spoiled wheat, maybe a mud carp somebody catches over the side or a rat they got lucky and skewered. Christ, if it wasn’t for the still Piet set up—” He never finished the thought, just spread his hand and let it fall like a severed head. “A long absurd drop,” he muttered, “from the womb to the tomb.”
And then the little man—Walter saw with a jolt that he reached no higher than his father’s waist—was tugging at the old man’s elbow; Truman bent low to hold a whispered colloquy with him. “Got to go, Walter,” the old man said, turning to leave.
“Wait!” Walter gasped, desperate all of a sudden. There was unfinished business here, something he had to ask, had to know. “Dad!” It was then that it happened: the atmosphere brightened just perceptibly, and only for an instant. Perhaps it was the effect of the moon, tumbled out from behind the clouds, or maybe it was swampfire, or the entire population of the Bronx staggering from their beds to switch on their bathroom lights in unison—but whatever it was, it gave Walter a single evanescent glimpse of his father’s left leg as the old man swayed off into the darkness. Walter went cold: the cuff was empty.
Before he could react, the shadows closed up again like a fist, and the little man was at his side, leering up at him like something twisted and unclean, like the imp that prods the ogre. “Now don’t you go following in your father’s footsteps, hear?”
Next thing Walter knew he was on his bike (bike: it was a horse, a fire-breathing, shit-kicking terror, a big top-of-the-line Norton Commando that could jerk the fillings out of your molars), the washedout, bird-bedeviled dawn flashing by on either side of him like the picture on a black-and-white portable with a bad horizontal hold. He was invincible, immortal, impervious to the hurts and surprises of the universe, coming out of Peterskill at ninety-five. The road cut left, and he cut with it; there was a dip, a rise—he clung to the machine like a new coat of paint. One hundred. One-oh-five. One-ten. He was heading home, the night a blur—had he passed out in the back of Hector’s car on the way back from Dunderberg?—heading home to the bed of an existential hero above the kitchen in his adoptive parents’ clapboard bungalow. There was dew on the road. It wasn’t quite light yet.
&nbs
p; And then all at once, as if a switch had been thrown inside his head, he was slowing down—whatever it was that had got him up to a hundred and ten had suddenly left him. He let off on the throttle, took it down—ninety, eighty, seventy—only mortal after all. Up ahead on the right (he barely noticed it, had been by it a thousand times, ten thousand) was a historical marker, blue and yellow, a rectangle cut out of the gloom. What was it—iron? Raised letters, yellow—or gold—against the blue background. Poor suckers probably made them down at Sing Sing or something. There was a lot of history in the area, he supposed, George Washington and Benedict Arnold and all of that, but history really didn’t do much for him. Fact is, he’d never even read the inscription on the thing.
Never even read it. For all he knew, it could have commemorated one of Lafayette’s bowel movements or the discovery of the onion; it was nothing to him. Something along the side of the road, that’s all: Slow Down, Bad Curve, oak tree, billboard, historical marker, driveway. Even now he wouldn’t have given it a second glance if it weren’t for the shadow that suddenly shot across the road in front of him. That shadow (it was nothing recognizable—no rabbit, opossum, coon or skunk—just a shadow) caused him to jerk the handlebars. And that jerk caused him to lose control. Yes. And that loss of control put him down for an instant on the right side, down on the new Dingo boot with the imitation spur strap, put him down before he could straighten up and made him hit that blue-and-yellow sign with a jolt that was worthy of a major god.
Next afternoon, when he woke to the avocado walls, crackling intercom and astringent reek of the Peterskill Hospital’s East Wing, he was feeling no pain. It was a puzzle: he should have been. He examined his forearms, wrapped in gauze, felt something tugging at his ribs. For a moment he panicked—Hesh and Lola were there, murmuring blandishments and words of amelioration, and Jessica too, tears in her eyes. Was he dead? Was that it? But then the drugs took over and his eyelids fell to of their own accord.