John Updike - Toward the End of Time

Her presence among them lent a new tension to our encounter. Stringy and besmirched, she yet was a prize, slim and upright, with bony hips hugged by tight tattered jeans and taut breasts perking up her cotton T-shirt. She had a square jaw and a pale-lashed squint. No one introduced her; I gave her a nod. Her presence imposed a certain courtliness upon us, while bringing out a scent of danger and competition. I was carrying Charlie Pienta’s shotgun, as if inadvertently. “I see you’ve finished your fort,” I said.

“That’s no fort,” the biggest boy, the leader, told me. “We just use it to watch the path.”

“And what do you see?” As if I were his captain and he reporting to me.

“Not much yet,” he said, after a pause in which he grappled with the something wrong, inverted, in his answering my question at all.

The second in command, the quick-mouthed lawyer-type, sensed an opportunity to enlist me in their troop. “Not much yet, but what with the warm weather bein’ here and schools gettin’ out, there’ll be plenty more for sure. They won’t be gettin’ by us.”

“What’ll you do?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Turn ’em back, man.”

“Suppose they don’t want to turn back?”

“We have ways,” the biggest one said, when his lieutenant said nothing.

“Well, this is very nice,” I said, smiling at the stringy blonde girl, as if she and I could share a joke at the expense of these dusky thugs. “That’s more than the police ever did.”

“Police,” the youngest said, the one that reminded me of my eldest grandson. “You ever call the police like you said you would about us?”

I turned to him, surprised and hurt by his challenge. “I’m saving them. I thought I’d give you guys a chance to clear out first. You know,” I went on, my eyes returning to the girl, who must have been about fourteen, and had moved closer to the big mute leader-she was his girl, the gesture said-“this little hut of yours could be knocked down in ten minutes. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it gone some morning when you show up. How do you guys get up here to Haskells Crossing, anyway?”

“Train,” the leader said, as if obliged to speak by the pale girl’s respectful pressure at his side. “From Lynn.”

The little lawyer hastened to repair any breach this admission had made in their security. “Somebody going to be sleepin’ here nights now,” he told me. “Anybody mess with this place, he’ll know it quick.”

I shifted the gun to the other arm, glancing down to see if the safety catch was still on. The last thing I wanted was an accidental blast; but the tension inside me seemed capable of tripping the trigger without my touching it. “I haven’t gone to the police yet,” I admitted. “But the next time I see Spin and Phil, I intend to complain. I pay them good money to keep people like you from bothering me. They should be around any day now.” In fact, now that I mentioned it, they were some days overdue.

The lawyer smiled, a lovable smile that tugged his upper lip high off his teeth, exposing a breadth of violet gum. “We about to tell you,” he said, “Phil and Spin won’t be comin’ round. They asked us to do the collectin’ in their stead. We what you call their proxies.”

“Phil and Spin,” the youngest said, with an expansive upward wave, as if their spirits had come to roost in the tree-tops, “they’re delegatin’!”

“They’re contractin’ out,” the lawyer amplified. “They gettin’ too high up to do the plain collectin’; that’s why they ast us. They said you a real good customer who wouldn’t give us no bad flak. Some of these customers, they need persuadin’.”

I was back, I felt with a happy rush, at work, in my office at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, doing a negotiation-shaving percentage points, feeling for weak spots. There were protocols to observe, procedures to follow. “How do I know,” I asked, “you’re empowered to act for Phil and Spin? Show me a document.”

“You go show us Phil and Spin,” said this lawyer in embryo. “Where they be, if they the ones collectin’?”

“The fact that they’re not here,” I said, “doesn’t prove that you are their agents. Show me a written power, a document that Spin has signed.”

“We don’t go so much by documents,” I was told. “We go by the facts on the ground. The fact on the ground is, Phil and Spin are phasin’ out.”

“Phasing out,” I said, acclimating myself to a freshened chill of menace. “And you are suggesting that you’re taking over their territory? Kids like you? You’re playing with grown-ups, boys.” I shifted weight, like a golfer doing his waggle, and the shotgun barrel swung lightly across the line of their feet and knees. They held their breaths.

Then the biggest of the three said, “You got a barn up there, right?”

I was surprised enough to hesitate.

“We been up there,” he prompted. “Nice old shingled barn with horse stalls inside.”

“From the horse-and-buggy days,” I explained. “At the beginning of the last century. You know, the twentieth.” I suspected they were quite innocent of history, of time. “Before the motorcar took hold, people still had buggies pulled by horses. You’ve heard of horsepower?”

Why did I want to teach these boys anything? I had no such impulse with my own grandsons.

“Be a shame,” the biggest said, “that barn burned down. Lot of nice stuff inside.”

Not so nice, really-bachelor furniture Gloria’s sons abandoned in their social rise, a few ancient bow-topped trunks and a dismantled maple bedstead from the attic of my parents’ house, an ornately gold-framed photograph of my mustached grandfather that I had not given to the Pittsfield Historical Society, spare or non-functioning power gardening tools, boxes of books that had overflowed the shelves in the house. Junk, but each a page of my life and a grief to lose to flames and ashes.

“You’re actually saying you’ll burn my barn down,” I stated at last, to keep the negotiations clarified.

“He not sayin’ no such thing,” the lawyer intervened. “He sayin’ only be one cryin’ shame that barn started to burn. Up there on that hill, not much water pressure even if the fire fuzz do manage to show. Public services spread mighty thin these days. They be sayin’ Haskells Crossing too poor to buy gas for the fire engines, these big old expensive pumpers they have from the old days.”

I was impressed by his store of civic information, but I addressed the biggest boy, whom I thought his associate perhaps underestimated and overprotected. “If I do pay you the protection money, how do I know Spin and Phil wouldn’t also try to collect? I can’t pay double. That wouldn’t be fair.”

At least that much was left of the United States after the Chinese war-a belief in fairness, rudimentary rights guaranteed to everyone regardless of creed or color. The boys accepted my point, wide-eyed there in the dappled, cavelike, buggy woods. As the sun passed noon, the shade deepened and dampened the air, and mosquitoes had begun to bite. Each of us in our conference now and then needed to flick a hand in front of a face being buzzed, or to slap a bare arm being bitten. In a universe only slightly otherwise constructed in its subatomic parameters, I reflected, there would have been time only for mosquitoes and sea slugs to evolve before the sun gigantically expanded and then titanically collapsed. “I would want a receipt,” I told them, “and a guarantee that I won’t be solicited by anyone else.”

The second in charge told me, “We not so much into guarantees and receipts-we not signin’ anything the police could use.”

“You told me there are no police,” I reminded him.