John Updike - Toward the End of Time

And now a step sounds behind me. My enemy is come. He is young, though tall and shaggy in his armor. Fine-meshed iron mail covers a long-sleeved tunic of green wool heavy with salt spray. He seems newly minted in the foundry of battle; perhaps I will be the first man he has slain. I drive my eyes to seek his face. His helmet is a pointed brazen dome that extends to a flared nose guard. Golden hair flows to his red-caped shoulders from underneath his helmet. When he lifts his cinder-black battle-ax high in both arms, the curly fleece of his beard lifts to reveal the clasp of his cape-an iron face incised with round staring eyes, snakelike horns, and fangs: his god, the enemy and antithesis of my God. He utters some words in his musical heathen tongue. I crouch beneath him, lowering myself to make his ax travel a hand’s breadth farther to reach me. I hurry my thought through one last prayer to Christ; like my doom now will He tower above my resurrected flesh in judgment, in the blinding light of the life to come. Though I sleep a thousand thousand years, I tell myself, it will be to me as an instant. But there are still things of this life to see. The infidel’s dog-white teeth are bared. Terrors swarm out of his deep-socketed eyes like bees bringing home honey from the freckled pits of a tall blue foxglove. I see that the boy is as frightened as I. This instant of time toward which our lives have converged has two sides of terrible brightness. Killer and martyr participate equally in the sacrifice our Lord commands. Poison and medicine are the same extract. Darkness and light are one.

Summer asks that we co-exist with too many other living creatures. The vegetable efflorescence depletes one’s morale. The sky loses color in the humid heat; the sea becomes a parking lot for sailboats. Orange daylilies lord it over the blowsy yards in the village; Queen Anne’s lace and Bouncing Bet brighten the meadows; daisies and chicory dot the ragged roadsides. A dead eviscerated frog appeared on our driveway: dropped by a crow, clumsy or sated? The mysteries of overplenteous life. I ventured into the buggy woods and found the full delegation, minus Doreen, in the hut, smoking cigarettes. “It keeps the mosquitoes down,” the biggest told me. He was José, I reminded myself.

“How’s it going, gentlemen?” I asked the three.

“A lot of kids goin’ to be tryin’ to come through here tomorrow,” the lawyer told me. He was Ray. Tomorrow was Independence Day. Haskells Crossing puts on a fireworks display that attracts masses from the village and beyond. Bare-chested Vikings, already drunk, lug coolers full of beer. No matter how repulsive and futureless these young males are, they always have girls with them, going along: it says something about our species. No man too bad not to attract a woman. If women were fastidious, the species would go extinct. Thug boyfriends pleasantly remind them of their thug fathers.

“And what are you going to do about it?” I asked.

The question was embarrassing. “Keep ’em in line,” Ray finally offered.

“That’s all? You should charge the people to get by,” I told them.

“You want that?”

“What’s the point of being here if you don’t? Not so much they can’t pay; keep it within reason. Say, three welders a head, five for a couple. Children in arms can get in free,” I suggested.

Ray, the little lawyer, asked, “This with your permission?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “For a cut, of course.”

“A cut? How much cut?”

I hadn’t thought it through but proposed, “Twenty percent. One welder out of five. That’s not so much. How else are the people going to get to the fireworks?”

“Supposin’ they say they won’t pay?” José asked. In his plump, seamless face his opaque black irises had a buttoned-on look, an extra protuberance that may have been an illusion produced by their brightness, their luxurious lacquer.

I laughed. A laugh sounds sinister in the woods, dampered by the greenery. “You’re asking me that? A big tough guy like you? Maybe I should find some new protection.”

“You’re sayin’ kill ’em if they don’t pay?”

“That seems extreme. And probably counterproductive. What you want is a happy line of paying customers. But, listen, this is your party. I didn’t ask you to camp here, on my land. Let them pass if you want. You have bigger fish to fry, remember? How are you doing with my neighbors?”

Each waited for the other to speak.

“Not so good, huh?” I said at last.

“They comin’ around,” the lawyer lied.

Manolete gestured suddenly. “They be sorry when we burn their houses down. Pfoom !”

“We have a saying in business,” I told them. “Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

Manolete, perhaps the brightest as well as the youngest, said in his abrupt, small-boy, explosive way, “Only eggs they layin’ is tellin’ us to get the hell off they fuckin’ property.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Kelly,” Ray interposed, “were reasonable. We show them your letter. They say O.K., they’d contribute something, but only a part of what you paid, since they only have three acres to your eleven.”

He was learning the language, I thought. “Tell them,” I said, “that that may be so but there are six of them and only two Turnbulls. Maybe mention casually that you would hate to see any of their children kidnapped; ransom costs a lot more than protection.”

They took this in, the three brown faces in the sun-slit gloom of their fragile little shelter. José volunteered, “Those Dunhams, they didn’t come up with nothin’. They treated us like dirt. He has his own guns, the cocksucker said.”

The Dunhams were a perfect couple, unless one considered childlessness a flaw. Their impeccable mock-colonial house, visible in winter, lay hidden in the leafy woods not two hundred yards from Gloria’s back garden. Athletic into their fifties, they matched like salt and pepper shakers. Both lithe, both forever smiling though faintly formal even in jogging outfits, their skins glowing with the same shade of suntan, their hair tinged with exactly the same becoming amount of gray, they came from old New England families with about the same amount of money and cachet. The world’s woes, and the woes that parenthood brings, had passed them by; there was a polished, impervious beauty about them that one itched to mar. Their only point of vulnerability was their animals. They had two prize Persian cats, a perfectly trimmed miniature poodle, and a piebald pony who grazed in summer in a little meadow carved from their section of the woods.

“You might think about killing one of their cats,” I told the boys. “They let them out in the morning for exercise and to do their business in the shrubs. Just kill one, leave the body on the porch, and show up for collection the next day. You don’t have to admit to anything, just don’t deny it either. If they don’t pay up then, do the dog, that damned yappy poodle. The horse-before you kill him, get some spray paint and paint his side. If he holds still for it, paint in numbers your monthly charge. Like an invoice on legs.”

In our box of artificial twilight, with its smells of tobacco smoke and sweaty mattress and pine needles masked by plywood, the boys broke into laughter at my wealth of malice.

“Any ideas how we should handle Mrs. Lubbetts?” Ray asked.

I was enjoying this. I loved these willing boys, so superior, in their readiness and accessibility, to my own grandsons.

Pearl Lubbetts was a Jewish widow-Earl Lubbetts had made his pile in potato chips and packaged popcorn-who had taken on over the years the imperious, lockjawed, rough-and-ready manner of a Wasp matriarch. She was usually dressed in Wellingtons and muddy-kneed dungarees, directing teams of local workers on one or another project of excavation, forestry, resodding, or masonry. She had built a private sea-wall to protect her front lawn from the tides, and at a far corner of her property had constructed a modernist beach house which was, as it happened, the only structure in my seaward view, summer and winter. She had cleared the surrounding trees, so nothing impeded my sight line; with its bleached redwood siding and flat white Florida-style roof and its sundeck balustrade like a bone comb, it was an unignorable blot on my view. Metal and glass elements on the roof and walls-flashing, skylights, twirling vents, and complicated tin chimney guards- beamed irritating glints into my visual field, unanswerable emergency signals from the edge of the sea; no matter what the hour between sunrise and sunset, some reflective angle boldly bounced photons right through my windows into my retinas.