John Updike - Toward the End of Time

Without considering an alternative action, I walked down on the slithery pine needles, gripping trees here and there to halt my sliding, to the boys’ hut. Only the biggest one was there. For the first time, without the intercession of the would-be lawyer and the mollifying presence of the youngest boy and the skinny blonde girl, I felt his weight as a man, his lethal capacity. My face must have shown the shock of my discovery, for he permitted himself the smallest of smiles, under the broad brown nose and opaque black gaze. “So,” I said, with a conspiratorial casualness, “you are qualified to make the collections.”

“Thass right. Spin, like we said, he took early retirement.”

“Phil and Deirdre?” Why did I care? My voice had trembled.

“They’re still around, maybe.”

“Is the monthly charge the same?”

“We were thinkin’ maybe it should go up a little. What with us providin’ on-the-spot service.”

He had mastered the corporate “we,” which diffuses and masks all manner of brutalities and denials. “How much is a little?”

“We were thinkin’, how about two thousand a month? You owe us for May. That makes four.”

“Two and two still make four. That’s some increase, from thirteen fifty to two.”

He shrugged. Though I thought of him as the big one, he was several inches shorter than I. Even weightwise, I was bigger than he, though my pounds could not be mobilized like the rubbery pounds of youth. The chinks in the hut, I noticed, had been stuffed with moss-defense against insects if not yet the cold-and the gypsum-board roof replaced with some plywood scavenged somewhere. They were learning. America is one big education. Two thousand was a lot of welders, for a retired man in a chaotic economy, but it was still far less than the old government had extracted from me, in dollars, for its wars and universal medical care, its mad schemes of spaceships in the sky and equal opportunity for everyone. It would be hard for a boy from Lynn to grasp how much a white financial adviser could stash away over the years. He was asking peanuts.

“I’ll have it for you tomorrow. I need to go to the bank for so much scrip. But I want something for it.”

He was silent, blank.

“I want you and your buddies to stay down here on this side of the-” I didn’t think he’d know the word “escarpment.” I gestured and said, “These big rocks. Stay away from the barn and the house. I haven’t mentioned any of this to my wife but if she finds out you’ll be in another ballgame. She’s a lot tougher than I-nowhere near as reasonable. She has that female thing of territoriality.”

He still stared silently. There was nothing in my assertions and threats that deserved an answer perhaps. All the concessions had been made; I felt a certain craven pleasure and relief.

“Deirdre say,” my opponent said at last, graciously to end the conversation, “you scared shitless of your old lady.”

The spring is so advanced into near-summer it has turned soggy and lost all shape. Azalea, dogwood, lilac, the blossoms of fruit trees are all withered and fallen into the detritus of moist earth. White is the color of the moment-lilies of the valley, bridal wreath, the maple-leaf viburnum that clings to the steep bank in drooping pulpy limbs that take root at their tips. This sinister plant, when on the way down to the mailbox I put my face close to one of its wide compound flowers, has an odor of decay, echoing the mephitic aura around Spin’s body. I can’t believe the boys are going to drag that body elsewhere, to prove themselves to another protection customer, but I would have heard, I think, the sound of a shovel digging a grave on my land; you can’t go down three inches without striking a rock. They came up, all three of them, as far as the barn to collect the packets of sepia paper I had withdrawn from the bank, and Gloria had spotted them from a third-floor window.

I explained who they were-the successors to Spin and Phil.

“I think you’re ridiculous,” she told me, “to have anything to do with men like that. And now boys. I wonder if any of them would like to work for us a few hours each week, helping out on the grounds? I’m devastated that Jeremy is thinking of giving up school and going to Mexico.”

Mexico, which had remained neutral during the Sino-American Conflict, was attracting many of our young people as a land of opportunity. Those who were denied legal admission were sneaking across the border in droves, while the Mexican authorities doubled the border guard and erected more electrified chain-link fences. They were talking of a Chinese-style wall, along Aztec design lines.

“I don’t think these boys want yard work. They’re into criminal activity, and very dangerous. You let me deal with them.”

Gloria had been thought when young to have promise as a dancer, and until her mid-teens had taken ballet lessons. Whenever she wishes to assert herself, she straightens her back and splays her feet, as she did now. “Ben, you really shouldn’t be handing them money. It’s pouring it down the drain and giving them a false sense of reality. Call the police. You say there aren’t any, but I see them all the time-just yesterday morning, three of them, all young and in uniform, were directing traffic around the collapsed road on the way to Magnolia.”

“They were moonlighting,” I said. “Or else it was bandits in stolen uniforms. They rob the armored trucks and UPS vans.”

“They were very courteous to me.”

Jeremy had come to us from a local fundamentalist college. He had a handsome but small head no wider than his powerful, flexible neck, so that at moments he displayed a serpentine grace. I had become dependent upon him; his appearance on a Saturday or Sunday morning would galvanize me into an attack on the outdoors I no longer could muster by myself, however earnestly Gloria nagged. Together, Jeremy and I would lop, haul, dig, Preen, trim, mow. He had long slipped away from fundamentalism and would confide, if he seemed sluggish, that he had been hitting the bars in Gloucester and had gone on to some girl’s apartment. But his natural Christian mannerliness spared me any details that might have made me jealous-whether the girl had a roommate, if she got into the act, if the girls did anything to each other while he watched-details my thick skull craved, out in the laborious sunshine. Jeremy can start all the power tools-the leaf blower, the weed-whacker with its spinning nylon string-that gum up, for me, on their infuriatingly viscid and approximate mixtures of oil and gasoline. As we grub away side by side at some desolate patch of garden which Gloria wants to restore to the supposed state of glory it enjoyed in the fabled days of household staffs and freshly imported Italian gardeners, I reflect on how little it takes to breed a relationship: paternal and filial feelings flow between us like inklings of sexual attraction. One day when a black hornet stung me below the eye, his voice shook in worry and concern, which I tearfully shrugged off. He admires my limberness as we scramble about on the rocks with armfuls of clippings for the burning pile or the compost heap, or together shinny into the ornamental apple trees to clip off the upright suckers that are poking into Gloria’s view of the sea. I encourage him to go to Mexico. I tell him he is lucky to be young in a world that is full of gaps and the opportunities underpopulation affords. My world when I was young, I tell him, was crammed with other so-called baby boomers, so that I advanced and made my little pile only by means of twelve-hour days and claustral conformity to the fully staffed pecking order. As he ducks into his old Nissan with a supple undulation of his sinuous bare-naped neck, I feel an erotic pang.