Free World's End by T. C. Boyle

granite on Anthony’s Nose—his father was a traitor, a conscienceless fiend who’d betrayed them, sold them out, and his mother had died because of it. And yet no one, not even Hesh, knew for sure. “Nineteen forty-nine,” Walter said. “The riots. Tell me, what did you do to her? What was it?”
    Truman said nothing.
    â€œIt killed her, didn’t it?”
    His father’s eyes had hardened, the look of the mad prophet come to dwell there once again. After a moment, he said: “Yeah, I guess it did.”
    â€œHesh says you’re no better than a murderer—”
    â€œHesh.” Truman spat out the name as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “You want to know?” He paused. “Go back and take a look at that sign.”
    â€œSign? What sign?”
    The old man was standing now, an odd composite of what he’d been eleven years earlier and the man who’d made his way in the world since. He almost looked dapper. “You tell me,” he said, glancing down at Walter’s leg, and then he swung around and strode out the door.
    It was the ghost ship all over again. “Come back here!” Walter shouted. “Come back, you son of a bitch!”
    â€œI’m right here, Walter.”
    He opened his eyes. At first he didn’t know where he was, couldn’t focus on the pale white field hanging over him, but then the smell of her—creme rinse, My Sin, tutti-frutti gum—brought him back. “Jessica,” he murmured.
    â€œYou were dreaming, that’s all.” Her hand was on his brow, her breast in his face. He reached up, still groggy, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world under the circumstances, began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse. She didn’t seem to mind. He fumbled some more, his brain numb, fingers like breadsticks, and then he had her breasts in his hands, weighing and kneading them, pulling them to his lips as if he were an infant in the cradle. But no, wait: he
was
an infant, his mother leaning over him with her depthless eyes, the world as pure and uncomplicated as a dapple of mid-morning sun on the nursery walls. …
    Jessica pressed her lips to his forehead, whispered his name. In that instant, the whole great busy chattering institution fell silent—the TVs were dead, the intercom mute, the hallways under a spell. Every doctor, every nurse, orderly, newborn babe and jittery blood donor held his breath. No hypodermic slid into arm or buttock, nodog-bitten child cried out. There were no footsteps in the corridor, no birds in the trees, no recalcitrant engines in the parking lot. Only silence. And at the very hub and center of that silence that was like an ocean deep lay Walter, with his abridged leg, and Jessica. In his fear, his solitude, his abandonment to grief and despair, he clutched gratefully at her, fastening himself to her like something half-drowned clinging to a rock in the midst of a torrent. Had he been crazy that night? To be hard, soulless and free was one thing, to be cut adrift from comfort and the community of man was another. He was a cripple, a pariah. And here she was, Joan of Arc, Calypso and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one. What more could he want?
    â€œJessica,” he whispered as she swayed above him, the gently undulating blond arras of her hair shielding him from the oppressive walls, the intolerable flowers, the bedside table with its tattered copies of
Argosy
and
Reader’s Digest,
the sickness and the hurt, “Jessica, I think … I mean … do you think we ought to get married?”
    The silence held. A fairy silence, oneiric, magical, the moment suspended and refined out of all proportion to the myriad moments that comprise a life. It held until she broke it—with a murmur of assent.
    Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Neeltje
Waved Back
    Jeremias was not so lucky. He withdrew into himself, gathered the meager skins about him