World's End Read Online Free

from the moment he’d opened his eyes—and he was sick of it. “You,” he said.
    His father grunted. “Me,” he said.
    The eleven years had wrought their changes. The old man seemed even bigger now, his head swollen like something you’d find carved into the cornice of a building or standing watch over an ancient tomb. And his hair had grown out, greasy dark fangs of it jabbing at his face and trailing down his neck. The suit—it seemed to be the same one he’d been wearing on Walter’s eleventh birthday—hung in tatters,blasted by the years. There was something else too. A crutch. Hacked like a witching stick from some roadside tree, still mottled with bark, it propped him up as if he were damaged goods. Walter glanced down, expecting a gouty toe or a foot bound in rags, but could see nothing in the puddle of shadow that swallowed up the lower half of his father’s body like a shroud.
    â€œBut Truman,” Walter’s grandmother said, “I was just trying to explain to the boy what I told him all my life. … I was trying to tell him it wasn’t your fault, it was the circumstances and what you believed in your heart. God knows—”
    â€œQuiet down, Mama. I tell you, I don’t need any explanations. I’d do it again tomorrow.”
    It was at this point that Walter realized his father was not alone. There were others behind him—a whole audience. He could hear them snuffling and groaning, and now—all of a sudden—he could see them. Bums. There must have been thirty of them, ragged, red-eyed, drooling and stinking. Oh yes: he could smell them now too, a smell of stockyards, foot fungus, piss-stained underwear. “America for Americans!” Walter’s father shouted, and the phantom crowd took it up with a gibber and wheeze that wound down finally to a crazed muttering in the dark.
    â€œYou’re drunk!” Walter said, and he didn’t know why he’d said it. Perhaps it was some recollection of the early years, after his mother died and before his father disappeared for good, of the summers at his grandparents’ when his father would be around for weeks at a time. Always—whether the old man was asleep on the couch, helping his own father with the nets, taking Walter out to the Acquasinnick trestle for crabs or to the Polo Grounds for a ballgame—there had been the smell of alcohol. Maybe that’s what had done it tonight, at the Elbow. The smell of alcohol. It was the cipher to his father as surely as the potato pancakes and liverwurst were ciphers to his sadeyed mother and the big-armed, superstitious woman who’d tried to fill the gap she left.
    â€œWhat of it,” his father said.
    Just then a little man with a gargoyle’s face stepped out of the shadows. He wasn’t wearing the sugarloaf hat or pantaloons—no, he was dressed in a blue work shirt and baggy pleated trousers with sidepockets—but Walter recognized him. “No drunker than you,” the man said.
    Walter ignored him. “You deserted me,” he said, turning on his father.
    â€œThe 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