John Updike - Toward the End of Time

“The bugs were gettin’ bad.”

“You said it.” I slapped loudly at three, one real and two imaginary. “What’s it like in there? Must be nice.”

They were reluctant to respond, but were too young to be coldly discourteous. “Have a look,” the boy called, and the girl lifted a piece of the netting so I could stoop and step in.

It was heavenly inside the tiny shelter. The stolen wire lawn furniture made the perfect minimalist fit, and there was a spare chair for me. Sunlight filtered through the corrugated plastic roof as an underwater tint of speckled green; the trees in my woods took on a vaporous, gesturing presence outside the walls of mosquito netting, which had been fixed to the floor with a tidy row of rocks.

“Just thought,” I said, seating myself, “I’d come down and see how you’re all doing.”

“Not complainin’,” the boy said. Until, the implication was, my visit gave him cause for complaint.

The girl was, a shade, more forthcoming. “José and Ray are off on business,” she volunteered.

“Good, good,” I said, stretching out my legs expansively. “That used to be me, off on the train to Beantown every day, working eight, nine hours at the least, eyeball to eyeball with the other sharks. The trick was to get control of some rich widow’s millions and then churn the money for the benefit of your broker friends. Or administer a nice juicy trust for point eight percent per annum. Pension funds and retirement plans-they were another boondoggle; the poor fat cats couldn’t make head or tail of the quarterly statements. People who have money, by and large, have a subconscious wish to lose it. A kind of financial death-wish-the species’ way of balancing things out. You’ve heard the phrase ‘Rags to riches to rags in three generations.’ Or am I talking too much? I love the netting; it makes this into a really enchanted interior. Another couple of rooms and you might turn this into a little seafood restaurant.” I noticed, through the opening into the first room, walled with branches and roofed in plywood, a bedless mattress striped with slivers of sunlight, like a nest of golden straws. “It must be tough at the end of the day for you guys to go home to your slummy triple-deckers, or wherever you live.”

“Not too tough. Night is really spooky,” the girl said. “There’s things out there. Ticking things.”

“I squash ’em with rocks when I see ’em,” the boy announced, his spindly arms showing how, in vigorous arcs.

“My name’s Ben,” I told the girl. “I believe yours is Doreen. Nice to meet you. How old are you, may I ask? Fourteen?”

“Just about,” she agreed.

“And you”-to the boy-“must be about the age of my grandson Kevin. He’s eleven.”

The child wordlessly nodded, vaguely feeling that much more conversation with me would be a betrayal of his peers. He saw that I was a smooth talker when I wanted to be.

“I’m sixty-six,” I told him. “Imagine that. When I was your age, if anybody had told me I’d be sixty-six some day I’d have laughed in his face. When I was young they used to say, ‘Don’t trust anybody over thirty,’ and now look at me.”

He looked, with his eyes like globules of oil. I asked him, “Shall I call you Kevin Number Two?”

His eyes went to Doreen and outside to the spectral trees and back to me. He knew giving up your name was a possibly fatal concession. “Manolete,” he murmured, just on the edge of my hearing.

“A great bullfighter, once upon a time,” I told him. “A fine and famous name. Carry it proudly, Manolete, as you perform in the arena of life. May your pases always be pure and the crowd ever award you both ears and the tail.” Lest he think I was mocking him, I explained to him, “It’s time that does it. It turns you from eleven to sixty-six in what feels to you a twinkling. Once gone, time leaves no trace. It’s out there in space, out of reach. The arrow of time. Some scientists think its direction is reversible in quantum situations, and others think it would be reversible if the universe were as smooth at the end of time as it was in the beginning. I can’t quite picture it myself.” I turned back to Doreen: “How are Ray and José doing, at business?”

“O.K., I guess.” She didn’t sound convinced.

Manolete, named, was liberated into one of his sudden large gestures, sweeping a hand toward the ceiling, whose tint seemed to hold us at the bottom of a dirty swimming pool. “A lot of old clients from Spin and Phil, they say, Tuck off.’ They say, ‘Show me.’ ”

“Well, you showed me” I pointed out.

Doreen, not to be excluded from our male conversation, volunteered, “They’ve been killing the people’s pet dogs and cats and leaving them at the front door, but a lot of these rich people say all the same they don’t want to pay anything.”

“People are selfish,” I told them. “What you need to do in an operation like yours,” I went on, “is to establish trust . Phil and Spin, people trusted them. They didn’t necessarily like them, but they could relate to them. You all have the disadvantage, may I say, of seeming a little young.”

Manolete’s arm darted toward me like a sword. “Young, we show them young . We got the guns, and we don’t give no fucking damn no how!”

“Well said,” I said. “But what you need, to convince people like me, is something written. I know people your age hardly even bother to learn how to read, but that’s how the people you want to convince deal with one another. With something in writing. Suppose I were to give you an endorsement. It would go something like, ‘I, Benjamin Turn-bull, of this address et cetera, hereby declare that these young entrepreneurs and enforcers of order have supplied their services to me in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. What they promise, they deliver, so help me God. These fine young men can be trusted.’ How does that sound?”

“It sounds like real old-time bullshit,” Manolete said, but with a smile, here underwater.

Doreen asked, “Why would you do that for us?”

Her torn jeans and loose T-shirt and rough short haircut did not conceal that at thirteen going on fourteen she had the beginnings of a figure. Slender pliant waist, budding breasts. At one end of the fertile continuum Beatrice was at the other of. “I like you,” I said. “You’ve brought some fresh faces into my lonely life. And you’re repelling trespassers for me, right?”

“‘Pay or go away,’ we tell the ones on the way to the beach,” Manolete said, with one of his pent-up gestures.

“Exactly,” I said. “Also, it seems to me, if I gave you such a written endorsement to establish your credibility in the neighborhood I might be entitled to a discount.”

“Discount?” Doreen asked. “How much?”

“Oh… what would be fair? Let’s say ten-no, fifteen- percent. Fifteen percent off the monthly charge. Don’t answer me now. Take it up with the other two. But point out to Ray and José that it’s the only way to get their racket on a respectable footing. I would write the endorsement in blue ink on my engraved stationery, that would show everybody it was authentic.”

Mosquitoes, as the long June afternoon slipped into damp shadow here on the eastern side of the hill, were finding their way through gaps in the netting. I slapped several as they approached my ear. Odd, that I who cannot bear to kill a spider, and used to hate it when one would suicidally crawl into the wet paint of some home repair, am heartless about mosquitoes, though they are all prospective mothers seeking a drop of blood to nurture their progeny. That telltale whine of theirs-I wonder why evolution has failed to silence it, through the survival of the unsinging. But evolution has its curious perversities and warps and failures to deliver the obvious. “You need bug repellent,” I said, standing but taking care not to hit my head on the translucent corrugated roof.