World's End Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œHector?” 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.
    â€œNo,” 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.
    â€œListen, birthday boy,” she whispered, breaking away and thenpulling 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.