The blood shot from his head to his groin.
“Come on in and get warm,” she whispered.
It was past seven when the Catherine Depeyster motored into the slip at the marina. Walter was late. He was supposed to have been at the Elbow by six-thirty, dressed in costume, to meet Jessica and Tom Crane. They were going to have a few drinks, and then go out to a party in the Colony. But Walter was late. He’d been out in the middle of the river, fucking Mardi Van Wart. The first time — there at the cabin door — he’d practically tackled her, grabbing for flesh like a satyr, a rapist, all his demons concentrated in the slot between her legs. The second time was slow, soft, it was making love. She stroked him, ran her tongue across his chest, breathed in his ear. He stroked her in return, lingered over her nipples, lifted her atop him — he even, for moments at a time, forgot about the blasted torn stump of his leg and the inert lump of plastic that terminated it. Now, as he helped her secure the boat, he didn’t know what he felt. Guilt, for one thing. Guilt, and an overwhelming desire to shake hands, peck her cheek or whatever, and disappear. She’d said she was going to a party up in Poughkeepsie and that he was welcome to come along; he’d stammered that he was meeting Jessica and Tom down at the Elbow.
He watched her face as she tied off the lines and gathered up her things. It was noncommittal. He was thinking about his bike, a quick exit, thinking about what kind of excuse he was going to run Jessica and wondering what he could possibly do in the next five minutes about a costume.
Mardi straightened up and wiped her hands on the peacoat. “Hey,” she said, and her voice was husky, choked to a whisper. “It was fun. Want to do it again, sometime?”
He was about to say yes, no, maybe, when suddenly the image of the ghost ship rose up before him and he felt as if his leg — the good one — was about to buckle and drop him to the hard cold planks of the dock. He was going crazy, that’s what it was. Seeing things. Hallucinating like some shit-flinger up at Matteawan.
“Hm?” she said, and she reached for his arm and leaned into him. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”
It was then that he became aware of a figure standing in the shadows at the far end of the dock. He thought of muggers, trick or treaters, he thought of Jessica, he thought of his father. “Hello?” he called. “Is someone there?”
The light was bad, sky dark, a single streetlamp illuminating the dead geometry of masts and cranes at the far end of the boat yard. Walter felt Mardi go tense beside him. “Who’s there?” she demanded.
A man emerged from the shadows and moved toward them, the slats of the dock groaning under his footsteps. He was big, his shoulders like something hammered on as an afterthought, he wore a flannel shirt open to the navel despite the cold, and his graying hair trailed down his back in a thick twisted coil. Walter guessed he must have been fifty-five, sixty. “That you, Mardi?” the man asked.
She dropped Walter’s arm. “Jesus, Jeremy, you scared the shit out of us.”
He’d reached them now, and stood grinning before them. His two front teeth were outlined in gold, and he wore a bone necklace from which a single white feather dangled. “Boo,” he said in a ruined, phlegmy voice. “Trick or treat.”
Mardi was grinning now too, but Walter was glum. Whatever was about to happen, he didn’t want any part of it. He glanced longingly at his motorcycle, then turned back to the stranger. “I’ll take the treat,” Mardi said.
“Looks like you already got it,” the man said, giving Walter a sick grin.
“Oh,” she said, taking Walter’s arm again, “oh, yeah,” and she made as if to slap her brow for forgetfulness. “This is my friend—”
But the Indian — that’s what he was, Walter realized with a jolt — the Indian cut her off. “I know you,” he said, searching Walter’s eyes.
Walter had never laid eyes on him before. He felt his stomach drop. “You do?”
The stranger tugged at the collar of his lumberjack shirt and winced as if it were choking him. Then he spat and looked up again. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Van Brunt, right?”
Walter was stunned. “But, but how—?”
“You could be two toads out of the same egg, you and your father.”
“You knew my father?”
The Indian nodded, then ducked his head and spat again. “I knew him,” he said. “Yeah, I knew him. He was a real piece of shit.”
Mohonk, or the History of a Stab in the Back
He was born on the Shawangunk reservation, Jamestown, New York, in 1909, the green-eyed son of a green-eyed father. His mother, a Seneca ye-oh whose bellicose forefathers had been pacified by none other than George Washington himself, had eyes as black as olives. Ignoring those black eyes and the warlike temperament that lurked behind them, Mohonk père followed the patrilineal custom of his own tribe, the Kitchawanks, of which he was the last known surviving member, and christened the boy Jeremy Mohonk, Jr. The boy’s mother was scandalized. Her people, the warriors of the north, the survivors, claimed descent through the womb. The boy, his mother insisted, was by all rights a Seneca and a Tantaquidgeon. If he married in the clan, he’d be committing incest. But the elder Mohonk wouldn’t be moved. Twice during the first month of little Jeremy’s existence he took a half-strung snowshoe to the side of his wife’s head, and once, after an especially vehement disputation, he chased her through the Jamestown feedlot with a dibble stick honed to the killing sharpness of a spear.
The upshot of all this was an informal knife fight between Mohonk pére and Horace Tantaquidgeon, his wife’s brother. They were scaling fish on the banks of the Conewango — yellow perch, walleyes, maskinonge — their knives glinting in the sun. Mohonk fils, barely able to focus his eyes, was strapped to his mother’s back and gazing up into the dancing green of the trees and the stolid, unmoving sky that rose up everywhere around him, oceanic and blue. The men’s hands were wet with blood, with mucus. Translucent scales clung to their forearms. There was no sound but for the rasp of the knives and the furious drone of the flies. Suddenly, and without warning, Horace Tantaquidgeon rose to his feet and sank his knife into the back of the last of the Kitchawanks but one. The knife stuck there, quivering, the blade lodged like a splinter between two ridges of the lumbar vertebrae.
For a moment, there was no reaction. The elder Mohonk, barechested and dressed in stained work pants, squatted over his mound of fish as before. And then all at once his eyes went cold with a new kind of knowledge, and he dropped to his buttocks, sitting upright among those hacked and dumb-staring fish that squirted out from under him as if they’d come back to life … but no, he wasn’t just sitting, he was pitching backward from there, his legs, his gut, his bowels gone, cut loose and drifting like so many balloons puffed with helium.