Toward The End Of Time Part 5

The little lawyer, as if not wanting his client to speak for himself, interposed, "My older sister, she know Deirdre. She told her the land all empty."

"It is not empty," I said. "I own it." I shifted my ground, perhaps disastrously. "There's lots of empty land, since the war." I was conceding an abstract squatters' rights, to entice them to go elsewhere.

"Less lately," the leader told me, with his deadpan facticity. His lips seemed stung and numbed by the words he was forced to utter. "Less now than there used to be. People movin' around."

The youngest one, whom I had appealed to as an image of my touching, grateful grandson, with a sudden wide wave of one thin and limber arm gave a p.r.o.nouncement almost poetic: "All these trees and dead rocks, they're not doin' anybody any good."

"They're doing me me good," I told him in a grandpaternal tone. "Me and my wife. They're part of our living s.p.a.ce." good," I told him in a grandpaternal tone. "Me and my wife. They're part of our living s.p.a.ce."

My tone, or this curious term, made the lawyer of the group snicker again, and then as if to cover up this lapse he pleaded, his widening eyes focused on my face and daring me to look away, "We was thinkin' just a little watchin' post for the summer. Cold weather come, n.o.body can use it, promise."

"Watching post? What would you watch?" This was my instinctive reply, but a wrong one. I should have instantly rebuffed the seasonal inroad. I was rusty at haggling.

The older one smiled, or at least his blunt, numb appraisal of me and my potential as an obstacle softened. "A lot of stuff goin' on" was his answer.

"He means pedestrian traffic," the lawyer said. "You may not know it, man, but tons of people use this path as a way to the water. We'd be doin' you a favor. We'd be keepin' people from gettin' up to your house."

"All these favors for free?" I asked-another mistake, a sarcasm taken as a concession.

"You said it," the spokesman eagerly agreed, his eyes staying fixed on my face in a kind of shining impudence. "No charge, absolute protection. We'll be makin' the place more tidy, too. Cleanin' up all this c.r.a.p."

It was an area which I visited, as my physical activities became more restricted, no more than once or twice a year. When we first moved here, Gloria and I walked to the beach every week and roamed the woods stacking brush and planning bonfires. No more: this site was mine only by law. A litter of beer cans and plastic soda bottles had built up.

The leader reached down and picked up the hammer. In his plump olive fist it became a weapon. He said to me stolidly, "You ask Deirdre and Phil."

"No," I said, sounding prim and excited even in my own ears. "I will speak to my wife about this. And the police."

"Uh-huh." "Sure." "You go do that, mister." All had spoken, to reinforce one another; the three boys drifted closer together to make a dense unit that, by some force of anti-gravity, propelled me, my face hot with anger and fear, back up the hill. As I climbed the slope, which was slippery with dead needles, my heart labored and raced. Around me in the fresh leaves raindrops began to tick. Rain would chase the interlopers away, was my cowardly consolation.

But I did not, yesterday, describe the incident to Gloria. I did not want her to know more about Deirdre than she had already guessed. The house was healing. Even the useless old coffee-maker that had been stolen had reappeared in a lower kitchen cabinet, tucked behind the extra soup bowls. I did ask her, though, if she would like to borrow the shotgun back from the Pientas. I told her I had seen deer scat in the woods.

Now in the suburban streets where some kind of order is still maintained, and even in the yards of those houses which are abandoned and boarded up or else burned-out sh.e.l.ls, the vibrant magenta of crabapple outshouts the milder pink of flowering cherry, the dusky tint of redbud, and the diffident, sideways-drifting clouds of floating dogwood petals. The stunted old apple to the right of the driveway, much topped to keep it from intruding on the view, puts forth a scattered show of thin-skinned white tinged with pink, like an English child's complexion. The lilac racemes, once tiny dry cones the color of dead grapeskins, are turning large and soft and pale. Nearer to the house, the fattening azalea buds are bright as candy hearts.

However luxuriantly the crabapples down in the village are blooming, there is one in our side yard, toward the Kellys', that is half dead. Gloria, in a dictatorial whirl restoring the order that I had let, in her absence, slide, asked me to cut it down. "Give it a chance," I pleaded.

"It's had its chance," she said. "Do it, or I'll call the tree service and they'll charge three hundred welders and another three hundred to feed it into the chipper. You're always complaining about money, here's your chance to save some."

"Suppose I cut my own hand off."

"You won't," she said, in a tone of stern dissatisfaction.

Reluctantly I descended into the dank and spidery bas.e.m.e.nt, sharpened the chain saw link by link with a dull round file, and adjusted its tension with a wrench and screwdriver. It has taken me years to get the trick of this adjustment; the clamp on the blade is out of sight, so one must feel one's way, as with s.e.x or (I imagine) a root-ca.n.a.l job.

Quick-moving spring clouds shuffled sunlight in and out of the cool breeze off the sea. Being half dead meant that the tree in its other half was alive, with a pathetic dutiful effort of sap and cell division pushing a scattering of buds toward the cloudy, gusty sky, even as the lower branches snapped off like a mummy's fingers. As the saw-voracious and smooth-cutting in its first minutes, its bite juicy with fresh bar-oil- sliced off the dry lower limbs, I came to higher, smaller branches still moist, with green cambium, and I called Gloria over before I proceeded. She looked where I showed her the round wounds oozing water, and sighed: "Ben, you never pay attention, but every year we go through this. Some boy with the yard service cuts out the dead wood and we decide to let the rest go and see if the tree will thrive. But it doesn't. It doesn't thrive. Some bug is at it. Or it just isn't happy in this spot; it's never been happy. Too much salty wind, or the ledge is too close under the soil, or something. Cut it down. Now is the time. We'll find something else that will be happier. Probably an evergreen-a Douglas fir or a blue spruce." Seeing me still hesitate, with an expression on my face that must have been pained, she said, with one of the few smiles she has granted me since her return "Sweetie, you're overidentifying. You can't be sentimental if you're going to maintain a property. Here's your choice: let everything go to wrack and ruin so the value of the place drops to next to nothing, or else put this very very unhappy crabapple out of its misery." unhappy crabapple out of its misery."

There was a pleasure, actually, in slicing up the helpless tree, amputating inwards, as the severed limbs acc.u.mulated in a high tangle on the lawn, and then cutting up the trunk in fireplace lengths as it stood there, a tall stump. The saw resisted, binding in the wet wood. The poor tree was still sending up sap to phantom buds. I dragged the limbs to the burning pit and stacked the trunk lengths in the garage, to be split some winter day. I too was half dead, but my other half was still alive, and victorious. The tree had gone from being my brother to being my fallen enemy. I gloated over its dismembered corpse, and resheathed the dull chain-saw blade in its sheath of orange plastic spelling STIHL.

This was days ago, in the tentative buddings of another season. Today, summer arrived, though it is still May. In Boston, the television said, the temperature hit ninety, and was close to that along the North Sh.o.r.e: the air of a different planet has taken over. The refrigerator works up a sweat. The sea seems sunken, greasy, like the concave underside of a silver ingot. The lilacs explode into pale violet and go limp, so that the branches sag out toward the driveway, brushing the sides of the delivery trucks that grind their way up through a haze of exhaust and pollen. Gloria goes off to Boston in a slinky summer dress that clings to her hips. She leaves it to me to put up all the storm windows remaining and to pull down the screens, and to install the air conditioner in our bedroom. It waits all winter in the closet under the attic stairs, beside the old bureau-a relic of my marriage to Perdita and one of the few items of furniture in the house I can call my own. When I wrestle the air conditioner up into my arms it has put on ten more pounds of weight; lugging it through three doorways and settling it in the open window, where it precariously rests on the aluminum fins that seat the combination windows and screen, stretches the outer limit of my strength. But the year I cannot lift it will bring my death closer in a quantum leap, so I manage to succeed, grunting and cursing and even exclaiming o.r.g.a.s.mically in my spurt of muscular effort.

Gloria is not here as an audience but she is here in my mind; I am trying to make her feel guilty in absentia in absentia-a hopeless game. After a certain age marriage is mostly, its bitter and tender moments both, a mental game of thrust and parry played on the edge of the grave. If she finds me dead of a heart attack with the air conditioner in my arms she will never forgive herself: good. Why does she insist on having the thing installed, when in a day or two the weather will turn cool again? There is a magic moment, as the ponderous box teeters on its fulcrum of aluminum fins and I struggle with one free hand to lower the wooden sash so it slips into place behind the air conditioner's frame, when if I lose my sweaty grip the whole intricate and c.u.mbersome caboodle will fall two stories to the flagstones below and sickeningly smash. This, too, would be good, teaching Gloria a lesson.

But it has not thus far happened. And will not this year. The metal monster secure, I tug out the accordion pleats of plastic that, screwed into metal holes, fill the rest of the window s.p.a.ces, and plug the pompous three-p.r.o.ng plug into the socket that waits all winter for this moment, and turn on the chilling hum (with a low rattle in it as if it needs tc clear its throat), and leave the room. Gloria is the one who must have air conditioning; the Hottentot secreted deep within me, the African grandfather, likes the heat undiluted- humidity-laden, lazy-making, caressing my limbs like an oily loose robe.

Outside, the heat has pressed from nature a host of fresh smells, musty perfumes of renewed rot and expanding tendril. The trees now have a blowsy look. Even the oaks, the last to leaf, have augmented their drooping yellow catkins with red-tinged miniature leaves, jagged and many-lobed. Stimulated by my triumphant wrestle with the air conditioner, I ventured into the woods, where I heard, close at hand, tapping and laughter. The acoustics of this acreage are such that sometimes voices and radio music from the town, across the tracks, sound uncannily near;, but these noises seemed to arise beneath my feet. I took the gun.

Hosts of insects have been awakened within the thickened leaves and shadows. A dead millipede, half crushed as if by an unknowing footstep, lay on the bathroom floor this morning. I puzzled over it, the terrible tangled intricacy left behind by its absconded vitality, and, too squeamish to use my fingers, swept it up into a pan with a brush and dumped it into the toilet, and flushed. Until the flush toilet, did men have any true concept of the end of the world? Dozens of tiny mayflies were attracted to my sweat. Born to live a day, they were crazy for me; I was the love of their tiny lives.

The trespa.s.sers heard my footsteps, though I had tried to be stealthy. The three dun faces, darker now that the shade had intensified, were joined by a fourth, paler but still dirty-looking in the light here below the escarpments, near the path worn parallel to the creek still farther below. The fourth face was female, a skinny young girl's. Their little hut was a pathetic affair nailed together of fallen limbs, the buckling walls reinforced by forked branches broken off by last winter's particularly heavy snow and still bearing last autumn's leaves. For a roof, they had found some large sc.r.a.ps of gypsum wallboard, probably dumped by a local remodelling project and dragged across the tracks. They wouldn't hold up long in a good rain, I wanted to point out. But, peeking in, I saw an essentially cozy s.p.a.ce, striped with light and furnished with a few metal-mesh lawn chairs stolen from somewhere in the neighborhood-not, I thought at a glance, from me. Mine had a wider mesh, and were safe in the barn. Where did they bed the girl, if they did?

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 compet.i.tion. 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 doc.u.ment."

"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 doc.u.ment that Spin has signed."

"We don't go so much by doc.u.ments," 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 a.s.sociate 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." 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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.tanically 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.

This made the pale girl smile. "Enough around to ha.s.sle you," she said. "That's all they're good for."

Her speaking up seemed to put us all on the same side of an unspoken gender divide. I advised the boys firmly, "If you are going to go into business, you must learn business methods. You must create a structure of trust trust. People aren't going to give you something for nothing, I don't care what kind of a world it is." As if this elementary lecture relieved me for the moment of further obligations, I turned to the skinny female and asked her as if at a party, "And what is your your name?" name?"

She had smoky wary eyes, greenish. Her nose was straight, with sore-looking nostrils. Her lips were thin, without lipstick; they began to smile in the complicity of politeness, then she checked herself with sideways glances at her companions.

In the murky shuffling light, infested with the stabs of swirling bugs, the most talkative of the boys became more childlike and aggressive as the girl's ability to talk another language came into play. He c.o.c.ked up his oval face at me and puffed out his lips. "She don't need to tell anybody her name," he said.

"Doreen," she said in a voice soft but distinct.

"Are you from around here?" I asked her. My c.o.c.ktail-party courtesies seemed to stun her protectors. I was asking her, as she sensed, what she was doing with these dusky hoodlums.

"Near here," she admitted.

"A girl guide," I ventured. Guiding the interlopers from Lynn around the local terrain: a girl Judas.

My politeness, my grave mature manner, no longer tempted her. "These are my friends," she told me sharply.

I pictured her naked with the biggest, most stolid boy, in the loosely built hut, while the other two kept watch. She would serve him, inexpertly, fumblingly, but serve him nonetheless. I resented her, knowing that tonight, lying beside oblivious, Boston-exhausted Gloria, I would want her, this wan slice of forest sunlight, as I rarely wanted anything any more. I would shift from my left side to my right side and back again, imagining Doreen and me embowered in the slitted light of that buggy, slapped-up hut. I would resist relieving myself by setting my hand on my genitals-lumps of obsolete purpose in wrinkled sacks of the thinnest skin- knowing that Gloria would spot the s.e.m.e.n stain when she made the bed. I would become again an inhibited p.u.b.escent lying sleepless and scared of unseen powers in that narrow house on the hill above Hammond Falls.

I doubted that Doreen sensed my l.u.s.t, it would have seemed so ridiculous to her. But I could have been wrong. I have never decided how alive women are to male desire, their own s.e.x tucked enigmatically between their legs, and how much simply adrift they are, waiting for an irruption whose unpredictability is part of its appeal.

The negotiations could go no further now. "I need some proof that you guys are collecting for Spin and Phil," I announced, and then was immediately unsure if I had said it aloud or merely thought it. In either case my self-a.s.sertion was absorbed in the moist caverns of thickening greenery as I, holding the comforting shotgun, ascended the slippery slope up to my house.

Lobster boats, bright white in the glazed blue morning, with red b.u.mper rails, have reappeared in the bay, sentinels of their patient, barbaric harvest. Each evergreen branch wears a fringe of fresh pale growth; the Austrian pines have erected candles inches long, all it seems in a few warm days. Along the driveway, Siberian iris carelessly dug into the daylily bed have flowered; their complexly folded heads of imperial purple lift on slender stems above the matted jumble of long leaves whose emergence as individual fleurs-de-lys I so eagerly noted not many weeks ago. In the circle in the front (or the back, Gloria would say) of the house, bridal-wreath blossoms bend their thin branches low, and enkianthus hangs out its little red-tinged, berry-size bells, beloved of bees. One day the fat and turbanlike rhododendron buds are about to pop, and the next day they have already opened, with azaleas and lilacs still unwilted, heaping extravagance upon luxury. Can there be enough bees to process so much pollen, so much nectar? The heedless June rush of it-the moon full and the color of cheddar as it rises through the eastward woods, the watchful torus at seven in the morning as faint as a watermark in expensive blue stationery, the dry bit of honeycomb most vivid at noon, unattainable and abandoned in its...o...b..t. It rained last evening; at dinner we could see through the kitchen windows the soft sheets of rain released by the evening drop in temperature; the late light was dimmed by the downpour, whose silver threads thickened and shimmered like strummed harp strings against the backdrop of now-solid green. This morning, a wreckage of shed azalea blossoms was strewn on the drying driveway's splotched asphalt.

Bringing back milk and orange juice from the so-called convenience store-their convenience more than ours, I think-I was startled as I exited (now that warm weather is here, one has to step over baby strollers parked just outside the door and dodge ungainly boys sucking on candy bars and soda cans while squatting wearily on skateboards) by a long-legged woman in shorts, her hair grayed in quietly dashing stripes, a smile springing into her face like an advertis.e.m.e.nt for faithful flossing. Did we know each other? I thought not, but we well might have. Her lean, purposefully conditioned body and crisp tan Bermuda shorts, her canary-yellow polo shirt and discreet pearl earrings bespoke the clean and breezy cla.s.s I had aspired to. We might have met in hallways m.u.f.fled by plush carpet, at a fast-moving get-together in a Boston apartment before Friday-night Symphony, or beside the striped straightaway at a girls' day-school track meet, she young enough to be my mistress but old enough to have discarded a couple of husbands, each of whom had left her more comfortably off than she had been before. Or perhaps she had proved true to her first cotillion partner, and together they sat out the world's recent meltdown like a fast dance they did not have the taste for. They settled for a sloping lawn, a heated swimming pool, twin Mercedes whose vanity plates say HIS and HERS or RAM and EWE. As we pa.s.sed at an angle there on the soda-stained sidewalk perhaps she sensed, between her legs or at the limbic back of her brain, my adoration. She flinched, or stiffened, as if walking through an automatic door. I would more than have died for her-I would have lived for her.

Born poor, I suppose I am fascinated by the upper cla.s.ses. Lazily they accept me among them, too confident themselves to care that I am an inwardly sardonic alien. Golf season has begun, and I am over at the club three or four times a week, mingling at lunch, blending into the Wednesday and Sat.u.r.day foursomes. Some of these men have never held a job. Their life stages have been marked by a succession of games: the child, introduced by his nursemaids to croquet and badminton and then given tennis and sailing and equestrian lessons; the boarding-school boy, hardened at soccer and ice hockey and lacrosse; the college man, persuaded to risk his bones in the football line and test his eyes and nerves on the baseball team, while skiing becomes second nature on beery weekend trips into the White Mountains and the underwater high of scuba-diving is a.s.similated during rummy winter vacations to the tropics; the suburban husband, partnered with his wife at paddle tennis and matched against his old college roommate at squash; the country squire, ten pounds heavier and rosier in the face, caught up in the physically lighter but financially heavier exertions of polo and yachting; the paunchy man of distinctly mature years, pa.s.sionate for the pedestrian challenge of golf and the poky interplay of Sunday-morning mixed doubles; and the stoop-shouldered dotard, still amiably feisty, extracting compet.i.tive thrills from billiards, bridge, backgammon, and yes, croquet again, in a more formal, white-clad version.

When St. Peter still sat guard at the pearly gates, how would he have judged these lives so devoted to regulated frolic? Not to mention the time-consuming fussing at the fine details of personal comfort, appropriate costume, fashionable vacation site frequented by like-minded others, and three sufficiently ceremonial meals a day? Nothing achieved Nothing achieved, St. Peter might have inscribed in his golden ledger, his ever-write quill of angel feather checking off one more admissee to the voluminous, red-lined columns of the d.a.m.ned. But no; his angelic pen hesitates above the lambent parchment, then, moving across the ledger's gutter to the opposite page, indites with smiling resolution, No harm done No harm done, adding a checkmark to the cerulean tabulation of the saved. The elect of New England expect no less, and it is hard to imagine how Heaven could be an improvement for them over their earthly days. The minds of these purely ornamental men are well fortified for the playful monotony of chorally praising G.o.d, where sinners, accustomed to variety in their fortunes, would be driven mad.

The summer cycle of, to amuse us old guys, weekend sweeps and senior tournaments has begun, and last week I found myself playing in the third-flight finals against my buddies Red Ruggles and Ken Dixon. My partner was Fred Hanover, a dear, dimly known fellow-member considerably older than I, itself endearing. He is a former club champion. Flashes of calm prowess flicker between spells of topping the ball and of obsession with the sound his pacemaker is making in his chest; he has trouble not listening to his own heartbeat as his life is mechanically ticked away. He and I had avoided simultaneous collapse and ding-donged well enough to beat two previous pairs of oppponents. But playing against Red and Ken was strange for me, on a Sunday morning when the gra.s.s was still soaked and a chill breeze cut through my ill-chosen golf shorts.

We teed off in a flurry of friendliness but by the second nine, with the holes even, I had no trouble hating our opponents. My having played so many rounds with them fanned my smoldering fury at Red's sloppy, muscular whacking- his forearms thickened by a youth of scale-sc.r.a.ping and oyster-shucking-and Ken's excessively deliberate, time-wasting style, as if running through a long mental checklist before taking off. While the retired pilot hung for what seemed minutes over the ball before unwinding into it with his maddening mechanical consistency, I could not stop staring at, and detesting, his shoes, white shoes which were oddly thick-soled, like the single shoe a cripple wears to even out his stride. But these were two two, two shoes exaggeratedly shoelike, like the corny shoes in old-fashioned comic strips, though unimpeachably serious and white. Still, some unfair advantage, or sneaking presumption, seemed involved, and when my turn at last came to drive on the par-five tenth I could not control an impatient quickness in the backswing and on the downswing an overeager boost from the right hand, my right elbow flying. The ball was pulled to the left but, by the same bad mechanics, sliced so that it curved back into the center of the fairway. I settled into the fairway wood with a restricted backswing and moved the ball over the traps and mounds to within fifty yards of the green. Meanwhile, Fred, with a good drive, m.u.f.fed his second, third, and fourth shots, looking up each time and producing an agonized yelp and an agitated gesture as if to pluck the ticking heart out of his chest. His fifth shot made the transverse bunker and he picked up; the hole was on me. Both Ken and Red had been scrambling and it looked as if a par would win it.

The pin was on the front left of the green, perhaps twelve feet in. I planned a little b.u.mp-and-run down through the medium rough that on the second bounce would dribble onto the green and ooze to within a tap-in of the hole. It was as vivid in my mind as a tinted, crosshatched ill.u.s.tration in a how-to-play-golf book. Fred slouched over to my side, with his kindly, sun-battered, games-wise face, his thatch of dry old bleached hair pointing this way and that in the breeze. He pleaded in a soft voice, "Go for the center of the green, Ben. Get safely on."

He had not in the two previous days ever ventured advice, however in need of it I might have been. He felt pressure, and was communicating it to me. My cunning little b.u.mp shot, which had tingled like a done thing in my hands as they lightly gripped the pitching wedge, went up in smoke. "Really?" I said.

The former club champion didn't back off. "Get it on the dance floor," he said, his jaw clenched as if these were his dying words.

With masterful self-control I did not chunk the chip but flipped it down the safe, close-cut part of the slope so that the ball skipped onto the green, winding up twenty-five feet from the hole. "Grrrreat," my partner gratefully growled. He had been so insouciant these two days, his anxiousness grabbed at me now. It was only a game, wasn't it? I felt almost dizzily tall, walking onto the green with my putter. Fred had picked up, Red had skulled his chip clear across the green, but Ken had methodically-after hesitating so long I thought his cogwheels had jammed-chipped to within six or seven feet. If he sank it, he would salvage a par, and that thought led me, just under the sc.u.m of consciousness, not to lag but to try to sink, for an unbeatable birdie.

I was too stirred up to take note of the slope of the green here, or the close mowing that had left the gra.s.s the color and texture of toast. I charged the putt and in utter horror, as Fred grunted in the side of my vision, watched the ball (an unlucky found Ultra) skim across the left edge of the hole and nightmarishly keep rolling until I was outside of Ken I was outside of Ken. An abysmal embarra.s.sment and incompetence possessed me; I walked to the hateful Ultra as if hiking to the ends of a sere and radioactive earth, then, hunched over, went blind, while blood beat against my eardrums like a raging prisoner. Blindly, numbly I lined up my second putt and stabbed at it and of course missed it, out to the right, ignoring the obvious break.

"Sorry, Fred," I said aloud, wishing him and all witnesses to my wretched three-putt dead. Even Ken's missing his makable seven-footer did not a.s.suage my shame; it had been my hole to win and I had blown it. I had blown it, I secretly believed, because my partner had inserted his own compet.i.tive pa.s.sion into the Zen zone I was attaining; but there was no way of saying this, and no way of redeeming my jejune blunder but by winning some holes. The harder I tried, the worse I got, overswinging, lunging, "swishing" the clubhead at the last fractional second, letting my right elbow roam away from my side to gain imaginary leverage. In the face of my uselessness, Fred plucked up some ancient proficiency; we scrambled and scrabbled up the slopes of this Sunday-morning match and ended two down on the seventeenth hole. We could have won it, and all my fault we didn't. Three-putting from twenty-five feet. I couldn't stop replaying the hole in my head; I took a sleeping pill but woke up at three in the morning back on that tenth green, dizzyingly tall above the receding putter-head, whacking the ball over and over again miles and miles past the hole while Ken, in his unbearable shoes, looked on in smiling wonder, as if a stewardess had just told him she would spend their London stopover in his hotel room after all, and my partner just out of sight around the corner of my skull grunted as if I had punched him beneath his pacemaker. I writhed; I thought of shaking soundly snoring Gloria awake; my eyes cursed the blank ceiling while my teeth suppressed a scream; I wondered what the point of human life was at all, if such dreadful things could happen under the sky.

Next morning, Memorial Monday, while saluting rifles rang out in unison in the town cemetery and television commentators put on their solemnest faces to chat for a minute about the millions who had given their lives pro patria pro patria in the recent war, Gloria told me I was taking golf too seriously. She wondered why I didn't give it up, especially since she could use all the help I could give in the garden, now that warm weather was at last here. in the recent war, Gloria told me I was taking golf too seriously. She wondered why I didn't give it up, especially since she could use all the help I could give in the garden, now that warm weather was at last here.

Give up golf? I love those men. They alone forgive me for my warts and stiffnesses, my tainted breath and protruding nostril-hairs, my tremors and white-capped skin cancers. My golf companions too are descending into deterioration, and trying to put a good face on it-joking, under the striped tent the club has erected, with a cold Beck's in one hand and an oily clutch of salted peanuts in the cupped other, over their own losses and lapses, life being a mess and a scramble at the best, men put here on Earth with hungers they must satisfy or they will die, and then they die anyway, men, men and women too, because for this ceremony of distributing prizes (Ben and Fred, Bradford Flight runners-up, clapclapclap) clapclapclap) women, the wives and girlfriends and daughters and granddaughters of the players, have come to the club and are helping fill the tent with human talk and laughter, the c.h.i.n.k of gla.s.ses and chomp of finger-food, the women in their perky summer skirts and knit polo shirts, women trim and lean and sun-weathered like the woman I saw outside the convenience store, women with their bright soprano voices gilding the brave baritone babble while unseen beyond the tent top the sad moons of transcendent witnessing and hollow endeavor lose and refind their pale shapes among the leisurely, operatic scurry of the fat clouds. Even Gloria came, stealing time from her garden, out of loyalty, wearing that straw hat we had bought years ago on St. Croix. I was touched, and gave her cheek a kiss in the cool shade of the sunny old hat, souvenir of our chummier days. women, the wives and girlfriends and daughters and granddaughters of the players, have come to the club and are helping fill the tent with human talk and laughter, the c.h.i.n.k of gla.s.ses and chomp of finger-food, the women in their perky summer skirts and knit polo shirts, women trim and lean and sun-weathered like the woman I saw outside the convenience store, women with their bright soprano voices gilding the brave baritone babble while unseen beyond the tent top the sad moons of transcendent witnessing and hollow endeavor lose and refind their pale shapes among the leisurely, operatic scurry of the fat clouds. Even Gloria came, stealing time from her garden, out of loyalty, wearing that straw hat we had bought years ago on St. Croix. I was touched, and gave her cheek a kiss in the cool shade of the sunny old hat, souvenir of our chummier days.

Going down to the barn to retrieve our two Havaheart traps-deer aren't our only marauding pests; Gloria claims the woodchucks are just waiting in their endless burrows for her flower garden to ripen-I discovered a human body propped against the barn doors, in a sitting position on the plank ramp. I don't come down to the barn every day, and the smell of decay was ripe, much stronger than AgRepel. There is musty musty, which is what the AgRepel seemed, and fetid fetid, which is what I catch when I inadvertently bend down over a toilet bowl whose under-edge has long evaded the scrub brush, and stinking stinking, which is what a skunk, not entirely unpleasantly, does. Then there are putrid, nidorous putrid, nidorous, and mephitic mephitic-blasts from the rotting heart of nature, where Satan with his foul breath writhes encased up to the waist in G.o.d's implacable ice. We turn our faces away, ashamed for Creation.

The body was Spin's, I could tell by the mustache, and the natty combination of blue pin-striped b.u.t.ton-down shirt and yellow paisley necktie with matching pocket handkerchief. His putty-colored summer-weight suit had been weathered out of press by wet nights and the bloating of the body within. The face, round and unformed now as a child's, was a mottled set of cheesy colors. A toothpick had been thrust into one open eyeball, like a martini olive-a childish cruelty in that-and the bludgeon or rocks that had been used on the top and back of his head had also been forcefully applied to his mouth, perhaps to loosen teeth thought to be gold. The corpse had attracted a cloud of buzzy supplicants, and the hands, rigid and hammer-fingered because of the pooling of blood in the tips, were crawling with small brown ants.

Even as I gagged, choking down regurgitation's burning acid, something in me soared free above this slumped puddle of deactivated molecules, soupily breaking down en route to their next combination. On the golf course one often pa.s.sed the litter of a dove or rabbit torn apart by a hawk or fox or owl: a discreet little splash of feathers or fur, as temporary as a dandelion head. Except for the plastic threads in his suit and the tips of his shoelaces, Spin would melt back into the woodsy mulch like a gutted mole. The gallantry of his attempt to dress and talk well, above his station as an enforcer, had fled and mingled with the atoms of the air, purifying their cobalt blue. We had usually ended our monthly conference by professing how much we trusted each other. In ungrateful, chaotic times, we had built up a relationship.

I raced back up to the house. Gloria was off somewhere, I hadn't been paying attention when she told me where, to the hairdresser or the pedicurist or aerobics or a Calpurnia Club luncheon or lecture. I was alone in the house with my heaving chest and the noisome, clinging afterscent of Spin's physical remains. I called the number for the police listed at the front of the telephone book. It rang three times and then a sugary automated voice clicked in, telling me to press the number 1 if this was an emergency, to press 2 if I wished to report evidence concerning a crime, 3 if I was requesting information concerning traffic conditions or the payment of traffic fines, and 4 if I wished to speak to the police for any other reason. I punched 2; the same sweet and unhurried voice told me to press 1 if the crime was violent, 2 if it involved theft, 3 if a white-collar crime, and 4 if it was a matter of a neighbor creating or maintaining a public nuisance or any other violation of civic order. I was beginning to sweat; I felt walled into a steel box. I punched 1, and then 4, and the voice told me pleasantly, with s.p.a.ces between all the words, "We're sorry. At present, all lines are occupied. But please stay on the line, and a representative will be with you shortly. We value your call, and apologize for this delay."

Then came some recorded easy-listening music, old standards in arrangements with strings and without vocals. From my childhood I recognized "Moon River" and from my teenage years the Beatles' "Get Back." The absence of the original lyrics was a political statement; since the war, the nominal government in Washington did not want any particular voices and themes that might cohere into rebellion. From the years of my marriage with Perdita there came "Call Me," by Blondie, and "Like a Virgin," by Madonna, both ghostly and purely soothing when severed from the rasping of their provocative chanteuses. I hung up, tried the procedure again, varied the procedure, but never succeeded in producing a human voice. For a tantalizing second there was a gap in the switching of automated circuits, but then the voiceless music closed in again. The police were impregnable behind their computerized deflectors. I dialled 911 and it was busy. I tried the fire department and got, on musical hold, some baroque tintinnabulation, Bach or Vivaldi, I didn't wait to determine which.

I hurried back outdoors. The birds-grackles, and a pair of raucous mockingbirds, and the nesting barn swallows- were filling the air with an excited squeak and twitter not much less mechanical than the incidental noises of evolving metallobioforms. The June sunshine beat down like a flattening template, giving each leaf and gra.s.s blade its shape. I ran down to the barn-a little lane once used by carriages and roadsters-and, as I had feared would be the case, Spin's body was no longer there on the plank ramp, leaning against the barn door, whose last coat of paint clung in green flakes like so many iridescent insects. There was just a shadow of dampness where the body had rested, and a lingering stench.

The corpse had been a message, in lieu of a certificate, and the boys had taken it away once it was read. I was being watched, though my quick visual search of the woods revealed only receding depths of fresh leaves, lobed maple and triform hickory and serrated beech, leaves invading and nibbling at the carbon dioxide, forming ragged caves and tunnels of air worming their way down to the tracks and the creek. I was apparently alone on my vegetable planet. A few burnt matches had been left on the barn planks, beside the two-legged shadow of dampness, as a hint of further dire possibility.

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 are qualified to make the collections." qualified to make the collections."