The Dutchman was something else. Something Walter had seen in a gallery in Amsterdam when the Solovays had taken him to Europe. Or maybe on a cigar box. He puzzled over it a minute, then chalked it up to genetic memory and indigestion, in equal parts. When the five o’clock whistle blew, he shook his head twice, as if to clear it, and then ran his bike down to the Throbbing Elbow to drain a sad pitcher of beer in honor of his twenty-second birthday.
But even here in the shrine of the present, with its neon glare, its thumping woofers and black lights, he suffered an attack of history. Clumping through the door in his new Dingo boots with the imitation spur straps, he could have sworn he saw his father standing at the bar with a girl whose dress was so short as to expose the nether curve of her buttocks. He was wrong. About his father, that is; for their part, the girl’s buttocks were incontrovertible. She was wearing a paper miniskirt hand-dyed by the Shawangunk Indians on their reservation south of Jamestown, with matching panties. The man beside her turned out to be Hector Mantequilla, with ragged wild hair and eight-inch collar points. “Van,” he said, swinging around, “what’s happening?” The girl turned around now too, hair in her eyes, a pout of makeup, nothing wrong and nothing right. Walter hadn’t seen his father in eleven years.
Walter shrugged. He was feeling sorry for himself, feeling orphaned and martyred and strung out, full of the merde of human existence and sick with the idea of decay: feeling old. It was 1968. Sartre was front-page news, Saturday Review was asking “Can We Survive Nihilism?” and Life had photographed Jack Gelber adrift on an ice flow. Walter knew all about it. He was an alienated hero himself, he was a Meursault, a Rocquentin, a man of iron and tears facing the world in unhope and as riddled with the nausea as a Jarlsberg is with holes. There was no way, for instance, he was going home to the chicken cordon bleu, asparagus vinaigrette, and glittering chocolate mousse his adoptive mother had prepared for him. No way he was going to thankfully tear open his sweetheart Jessica’s gift — a new helmet, bronze like the sun and decorated with daisy decals that spelled out his name — and then tenderly undress her beneath the azalea bush out back with the night like a sleeper’s breath whispering in his ear. No way. At least for a while yet.
“What you drinking, man?” Hector said, leaning into the bar for support. His shirt, which seemed to be fashioned from a synthetic fabric composed of Handi-Wrap and styrofoam, featured a pair of bleeding eyeballs and a slick pink tongue that plunged into the depths of his waistband.
Walter didn’t answer right away, and when he did it was with a non sequitur. “It’s my birthday,” he said. Though he was looking at the girl, he was seeing his grandmother again, the flesh of her heavy arms trembling over a mound of turnip peels, the look on her face when she told him she’d had the phone disconnected because her neighbor — a notorious witch — was sending witch lice over the wire. Superstitious in a way that connected her to the past as firmly as the gravestones rooted in the cemetery on the hill, she’d spent the last twenty years of her life making ceramic ashtrays in the shape of the trash fish her husband extracted from his nets and tossed on the riverbank to rot. They’re the dispossessed, she used to say, glaring at Walter’s hairy grandfather. God’s creatures. I can see them in my sleep. Fish, fish, fish.
“Yes, yes!” Hector shouted. “Your birthday, man!” And then roared for Benny Settembre, the bartender, to set them up. Hector was a native of Muchas Vacas, P.R., the son of slaves and Indians who became slaves. The son of something else too: his eyes were as green as the Statue of Liberty. “I got something for you, man — something special,” he said, taking Walter’s arm. “In the men’s room, you know?”
Walter nodded. The jukebox started up with the sound of shattering glass and rocks against the flanks of buses. Hector took hold of his arm and started toward the bathroom, then stopped cold. “Oh yeah,” he said, indicating the girl. “This is Mardi.”
Six hours later, Walter found himself thinking about water sports. But only fleetingly and because the occasion suggested it. He was on the far side of the river from Peterskill, a mile and a half from home as the fish swims, eleven or twelve by car, and up to his neck in the greasy Stygian drift of the nighttime Hudson. Swimming. Or about to swim. At the moment he was feeling his way through the bottom muck, planted firmly against the current, the rich organic scent of the river in his nostrils, a perfume that managed to combine the essences of aquatic devolution, orange peels, diesel fuel and, yes, merde. Ahead of him, in the dark, he could hear Mardi’s laughter and the soft gentle swirl of her scissor kick. “Come on,” she whispered. “It’s nice, really.” And then she giggled, a sound so natural it could have come from one of the lovelorn insects in the trees that rose up from the shore in a black unfathomable wall.
“Shit!” Hector cursed softly behind them, and there was a terrific splash — the sound of disporting porpoises, depth charges, beer kegs dropped from a pier — and then his high wild laugh.
“Shhhh!” Walter hissed. He didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all. But he was drunk — worse, he was stoned off his feet on the pills Hector had been feeding him all night — and past the point of caring. He felt the buoyancy of the water like the hands of the river nymphs as he lifted off and dug into the surface in a stealthy breaststroke.
They’d left the Elbow at ten to sit out back in Hector’s bumper-blasted ’55 Pontiac and pass a pipe. Walter hadn’t called home — hadn’t done much of anything for that matter except pin beer bottles to his lips — and he thought of Jessica, of Hesh and Lola and his aunt Katrina, with a sort of perverse pleasure. They were missing him now, that was for sure. The chicken Cordon Bleu had dried up in the oven, the asparagus gone limp, the mousse fallen. He pictured them huddled glumly around the redwood picnic table, cocktails going weak with melted ice, toothpicks congealing in a puddle of grease on the platter long since denuded of Swedish meatballs. He pictured them — his family, his girlfriend — waiting for him, Walter Truman Van Brunt, creature of his own destiny, soulless, hard, free from convention and the twin burdens of love and duty, and took the pipe from the hand of a stranger. They were missing him now, oh yes indeed.
But then he felt a stab of guilt, the curse of the apostate, and saw his father again. This time the old man was crossing the parking lot alone, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his striped bell-bottoms, a mauve scarf trailing down his chest. He stopped even with the car window, bent from the waist, and peered in with that mad, tortured look he’d brought with him when he appeared out of nowhere for Walter’s eleventh birthday.