Out of nowhere. Like an apparition. Huge, his head cropped to a reddish stubble, pants torn and greasy, jacket too small, he’d looked like a cross between the Wandering Jew and the Ghost of Christmas Past, he’d looked like an ecstatic who’s lost the ecstasy, a man with no future, a bum. So insubstantial Walter would have missed him altogether if it weren’t for the shouting. Eleven years old, glutted on pink-frosted cake, root beer, chocolate marshmallow supreme and Mars Bars, Walter was up in his room knocking around with his new set of Presidents, Regents and Ministers of the World when he heard a tumult of voices from the front of the house. Hesh’s voice. Lola’s. And another, a voice that sounded as if it were inside his head, as if it were thinking for him, strange, magnetic and familiar all at once.
The front door was open. Hesh stood in the doorway like a colossus, Lola at his side. Beyond them, on the front lawn, was a man with a head like a pumpkin and colorless, rinsed-out eyes. He was wrought up, this man, nearly amuck, dancing on one foot with anger and chanting like a shaman, the litany of his hurts pouring out of him like vinegar. “Flesh of my flesh!” the man yelled, over and over.
Hesh, big Hesh, with his bald honest head and his forearms that were like hammers, was shouting at this man who looked like a bum — at Walter’s father — as if he wanted to kill him. “Son of a bitch!” Hesh raged in a high agitated voice, each word cut clear and distinct. “Liar, thief, murderer! Get out. Get out of here!”
“Kidnappers!” the man bawled back at him, bending to pound the earth in his rage. But then all of a sudden Walter edged into view, puzzled and frightened, and the man fell 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?”
“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.