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
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.
This made the pale girl smile. “Enough around to hassle 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
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 cocked 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 cocktail-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 semen stain when she made the bed. I would become again an inhibited pubescent lying sleepless and scared of unseen powers in that narrow house on the hill above Hammond Falls.
I doubted that Doreen sensed my lust, 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 sex 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- assertion 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 bumper 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 orbit. 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 advertisement 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 class I had aspired to. We might have met in hallways muffled 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 passed at an angle there on the soda-
