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.
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 alclass="underline" 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.
“Walter,” Lola was whispering as if from a great distance. “Walter — are you all right?”
He tried to pin it down, put it all together again. Mardi. Hector. Pompey. The ghost ships. Had he climbed the anchor chain? Had he actually done that? He remembered the car, Pompey’s wasted face, the way Mardi’s paper dress had begun to dissolve from contact with her wet skin. He had his hands on her breasts and Hector’s were moving between her legs. She was giggling. And then it was dawn. Birds going at it. The parking lot out back of the Elbow. “Yeah,” he croaked, opening his eyes again, “I’m all right.”
Lola was biting her lip. Hesh wouldn’t look him in the eye. And Jessica — soft, powdered, sweet-smelling Jessica — looked as if she’d just run back-to-back marathons and finished last. Both times.
“What happened?” Walter asked, stirring his legs.
“It’s okay,” Hesh said.
“It’s okay,” Lola said. “It’s okay.”
It was then that he looked down at the base of the bed, looked down at the sheet where his left foot poked up like the centerpole of a tent, and at the sad collapsed puddle of linen where his right foot should have been.
O Pioneers!
Some three hundred years before Walter dodged a shadow and made his mark on the cutting edge of history, the first of the Peterskill Van Brunts set foot in the Hudson Valley. Harmanus Jochem Van Brunt, a novice farmer from Zeeland, was a descendant of herring fishermen in whose hands the nets had gone rotten. He arrived in New Amsterdam on the schooner De Vergulde Bever in March of 1663, seeking to place as great a distance as possible between himself and the ancestral nets, which he left in the care of his younger brother. His passage had been underwritten by the son of a Haarlem brewer, one Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart, who, under the authority of Their High Mightinesses of the States General of Holland, had been granted a patroonship in what is now northern Westchester. Van Wart’s agent in Rotterdam had paid out the princely sum of two hundred fifty guilders to cover the transoceanic fare for Harmanus and his family. In return, Harmanus, his wife (the goude vrouw Agatha, née Hooghboom) and their kinderen, Katrinchee, Jeremias and Wouter, would be indentured servants to the Van Warts for all their days on earth.
The family was settled on a five-morgen farm a mile or so beyond Jan Pieterse’s trading post at the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek, on land that had lately been the tribal legacy of the Kitchawanks. A crude timber-and-thatch hut awaited them. The patroon, old Van Wart, provided them with an axe, a plow, half a dozen scabious fowl, a cachexic ox, and two milch cows, both within a dribble of running dry, as well as a selection of staved-in, battered and cast-off kitchen implements. As a return on his investment, he would expect five hundred guilders in rent, two fathoms of firewood (split, delivered and reverently stacked in the cavernous woodshed at the upper manor house), two bushels of wheat, two pair of fowl, and twenty-five pounds of butter. Due and payable in six months’ time.