“I bought the land because I had the money when nobody else did and because I got it for a song,” Peletiah was saying. “There was something about the place. I thought I’d like to build on it someday, but you know how that is. …” He waved his hand in dismissal. His eyes were shrewd; the little smile clung to his lips. “You want it?” he asked after a moment. “You want to camp here, swim in the creek, tramp the woods — go ahead. It’s yours. More power to you.”
Two years later, Peletiah extended the invitation to 20,000 likeminded people, and the field below, on the far side of Acquasinnick Creek, filled with them. That was a fine and triumphant thing, but it was the first night — the night of the aborted concert — that was the real test. No more than a hundred and fifty turned up that night, with their picnic baskets and blankets to spread out in the grass. Jeremy watched them from the trees. He had no idea that Sasha Freeman had organized the event — hadn’t heard from him in twenty years — but it was a thing he could approve of, a thing he could recognize and applaud.
When the trouble started, he never hesitated. Circling the arena, a shadow among shadows, he surprised bat-toting veterans and skulking boys alike, springing from the bushes with a whoop or merely rising up before them like a wrathful demon. Most took to their heels at the sight of him, but a handful — drunker or more foolish than the rest — kept coming. It was just what he wanted. He broke noses, bloodied lips, bruised ribs — and each kick, each punch, was a debt repaid. A paunchy veteran came at him with a tire iron and he kicked him in the groin. He snatched a fence post from a man with the sunken red-flecked eyes of a pig and slapped his backside with it till he began to squeal. At some point he discovered blood on his hands and forearms, and he paused to draw a single incarnadine slash beneath each of his eyes, and then, looking fierce and aboriginal, looking like a warrior of old, he chased a pair of teenaged boys till they collapsed in tears, begging for mercy. Mercy was a thing he’d never known, but he stayed his hand, thinking of Peletiah, thinking, for once, of the repercussions. He let them go. And then, as dusk began to thicken the branches of the trees and the cries from the roadway grew more hellish and disjointed, he drifted instinctively toward the open field to the north, and there, in the gathering gloom, made the acquaintance of Truman Van Brunt.
Truman was wearing a polo shirt and a pair of baggy white trousers, and he was conferring with a big-armed man in a bloodied work shirt and what appeared to be a boy of six or seven. Though the Indian had never laid eyes on Truman before, and didn’t learn his name till the following morning in Peletiah’s kitchen, there was something familiar about him, something that tugged at his consciousness like a half-remembered dream. Crouched low in the bushes, Jeremy watched. And listened.
The big-armed man was wrought up, his eyes wild, his hands raking at one another as if with some uncontainable itch. He wanted to know if the man in the polo shirt would make a sacrifice for them, if he’d try to slip through the mob and get help — because if help didn’t come soon, they were doomed. Truman didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll go, but only if I can take Piet with me,” and he indicated the boy. It was when the boy spoke—“Fuck, you goddamned well better take me with you”—that Jeremy recognized his mistake. He looked again. This was no boy — no, this was a man, a dwarf, his twisted little face blanched with evil, this was the pukwidjinny come to life. Jeremy clenched his fists. Something was wrong here, desperately wrong. Suddenly there was a shout from the direction of the arena, and the big-armed man threw a nervous glance over his shoulder. “Take him,” he said, and Truman and the dwarf started across the field.
The Indian gave it a minute, till the man with the big arms had turned and jogged back toward the arena, and then he emerged from the trees and started after Truman. Silent and slow as a moving statue, bent double in his stalking crouch, he crept up on the man in the polo shirt and his undersize companion. Truman never once glanced over his shoulder. In fact, he strode through the field as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if he were strolling into a restaurant for Sunday brunch instead of going out to risk his neck among the mad dogs on the road ahead of him. The Indian, hurrying now to keep up, thought he must be insane. Either that or he was the bravest man alive.
Suddenly three figures broke from the trees at the road’s edge and started for Truman and the dwarf. They wore Legionnaire’s caps and dirty T-shirts. All three brandished weapons — jack handles and tire chains hastily plucked from the trunks of their cars. “Hey, nigger-lover,” the one in the middle called, “come to poppa.”
Jeremy sank low in the grass, ready for trouble. But there wasn’t any trouble, that was the odd thing. Truman just walked right up to them and said something in a low urgent tone — something the Indian couldn’t quite catch. Whatever he’d said, though, it seemed to placate them. Instead of raising their weapons, instead of flailing at him like the mad dogs and capitalist tools they were, they ducked their heads and grinned as if he’d just told the joke of the century. And then, astonishingly, one of them held a bottle out to him and Truman took a swig. “Depeyster Van Wart,” Truman said, and his voice was as clear suddenly as if he were standing right there beside the Indian, “you know him?”
“Sure,” came the reply.
“Is he up the road somewhere or what?”
At that moment, a dull roar rose up from the concert grounds, and all five of them — the dwarf, the Legionnaires and Truman — turned their heads. Jeremy held his breath.
“I seen him up around the bend there, up at the road into the Crane place.” The man who clutched the tire chains was speaking, the dry rasp of his voice punctuated by the clank of steel on steel. “We’re going to make a run at the fuckers soon as it’s dark.”
“Take me to him, would you?” Truman said, and the Indian, buried in the tall grass like a corpse, went cold with an apprehension that was like a stab in the back, that was like the hard-edged message his father had received from Horace Tantaquidgeon in a time past. “I’ve got news.”
“Kikes and niggers, kikes and niggers,” the dwarf sang, his voice pinched and nasal, echoing as if he’d poured himself into the bottle Truman had handed him. Then the five of them moved off through the trees that fringed the road. As soon as they were gone, Jeremy Mohonk pushed himself up from the grass. White men. They’d betrayed the Kitchawanks, the Weckquaesgeeks, the Delawares and Canarsees, and they betrayed their own kind too. It was on his lips: the taste of the shit they’d made him eat in prison. He thought of Peletiah, thought of the men he’d punished in the woods, thought of the women and children huddled around the stage with their pamphlets and picnic baskets. Thought of them all and rose up out of the weeds to trail the fink in the polo shirt.
Out on the road, all was confusion. Some of the cars parked along the shoulders had flicked on their headlights, and the pavement glittered with broken glass. In this naked white light, the Indian could see groups of men and boys hurrying in both directions, while dogs nosed about and people perched on fenders or sat in their cars as if awaiting a fireworks display or the heifer judging at the county fair. There was a smell of scorched paint on the air, of creosote and burning rubber. Somewhere a radio was playing. Jeremy squared his shoulders and emerged from the bushes between two parked cars. He sidestepped a cluster of young women passing a bottle of wine and started up the road. No one said a word to him.