World's End Read Free

silent. A change came over his face—it had been ugly and vehement and now suddenly it was as composed as a priest’s—and he went down on one knee and spread his arms. “Walter,” he said, and the tone of it was the most seductive thing the boy had ever heard. “Don’t you know who I am?”
    â€œTruman,” 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. Alittle 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 theghost 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