Toward the End of Time (13 page)

But first, unable to face the suffocating cellar, I bought Mildred a dollhouse at the Boston F. A. O. Schwarz, with a hinged roof and tiny doorways and movable window sashes. I am sure she preferred it to the crude one I would have made. It stood in her room for many years, though the phase of life in which she could entertain domestic fantasies within its miniature walls and enthusiastically play with it soon passed. This period of my children’s childhoods seems as I look back upon it one great loss and waste, through my distraction. I gave them shelter and went through the motions but I remember mostly sorrow—broken bones, dead gerbils and dogs, little round faces wet with tears, a sickening river of junk food, and their sad attempt, all five of them before they passed into the secrecy of adolescence, to call me out of myself into the sunshine of their love.

A line of geese overhead, honking. Not a V—for some reason, in their haste to return to the warming North, they all fly off the same wingtip, and form a single long diagonal line pointing toward the Willowbank Country Club. Green goose excrement makes the short sixth fairway, by the pond, free-drop territory, there is such an abundance of it.

And the sky has a cloudy wet-wash tousled look you never see in winter, when the sky knows its mind for certain. Spatterings of big drops abruptly turn to sunshine, making puddles flash like shields.

Driving back from a quick run to the former super-market
—mostly empty aisles now but word went out that they were expecting shipments of orange juice and chicken breasts in, and the lines would be only an hour long—I heard on the radio this man with a mellow voice from Minnesota reading an old poem about spring, and as soon as I got back I tried to write down some lines.
When March is scarcely here a color stands abroad on solitary fields that science cannot overtake but human nature feels
. This color
waits upon the lawn
(maybe I heard it wrong) and
shows the furthest tree
and almost speaks to the poet but
then, as horizons step or noons report away
(probably misheard),
it passes, and we stay
. It was like being a psychotic and hearing the sick neurons, the degenerate voices of the gods, broadcasting inside your head. I had never heard the sadness of spring expressed before:
A quality of loss afflicting our content
, and then something about
encroached
(it sounded like)
upon a sacrament
Eerie, magical stuff. I never heard the poet’s name.

Spin and Phil, the collectors for the local crime overlords, came up to the house for their monthly installment. Nine hundred twenty-five welders for straight protection, one thousand for the deluxe. The money must be in cash, in bills no bigger than twenties. I’ve been paying deluxe, on their recommendation, but today I asked, “What do I get extra for the deluxe that the straight doesn’t deliver?” I think having Deirdre in the house now emboldened me. Though she is just a woman, she is one of them—valley people, people from beyond this hill.

Spin is natty, with a red-and-gray bushy mustache, a toothpick he rolls around in his mouth, and a nice tidy way of expressing himself, like an old-style movie actor. “Mr. Turnbull, what you get is active consideration, not just passive. With the deluxe, anybody gives you trouble,
anybody
, we come after them. With the straight, you get no hassle
from us, but if anybody else gets on your case, you’re on your own. Can you follow that?”

“Just barely,” I say. “Suppose I paid you nothing, how would that differ from the straight?”

Phil is heavier-set, and still wears brown suits, which don’t ever look pressed. “It’d be ugly, Ben,” he told me, with a quick hitch in his shoulders that made his suit jacket hang worse than ever. “I don’t want to have to think about it. I don’t want
you
to have to think about it. Hey, this is a beautiful place you got here. Wood, though. Hundred-year-old wood, at least. Get to burning up on this hill, there’d be no stopping it. They don’t make fire hoses long enough.”

I intended to pay, but, as with insurance salesmen in the old days, or company representatives touting a public stock offering, I liked to tease them a little, to make them work for what we both knew was a societally condoned rip-off. “I don’t
need
so much house,” I told them. “With all the expense, I’m thinking of moving. It’s not as if I’m not still paying taxes on top of everything else.”

“Some taxes,” Spin coolly sneered. “Local and commonwealth. I can remember, so can you, when there were federal taxes, and the structure in place to enforce the collection. It was called the 1RS.”

I said, “There’s a lot of talk on the radio about starting it up again. A lot of people miss the federal government.”

“Fat chance,” Phil said, “after that dumbhead dust-up with the Chinks. They blew it.”

Deirdre heard the male voices on the lawn, in the front circle, and came out with her hair in curlers and green cream on her face. “You creeps ever think of getting lost?” she asked.

“Watch your mouth, Dee,” Phil said.

“You know Deirdre?” I asked.

Phil didn’t answer.

“We went to high school together,” she admitted. “He was a loser then, and he’s a loser now. What are they asking money for?”

“Protection,” I told her. “They see that no harm comes to me, despite the breakdown of law and order.”

“Ha!” she said. “These two jerks saying they’re the new law and order? Go inside and call the police, Ben. This is intimidation and threatened assault and arson and I don’t know what all else.”

“Are there still police?” I wondered aloud.

“Sure,” Deirdre said.

“You don’t see them standing guard at road repairs any more,” I pointed out, adding helpfully, “Maybe because there are no road repairs.”

“They’re too busy,” Deirdre said, “locking up crooked morons like this and throwing away the key.”

Spin contemplated her with a smile, shifting the toothpick from one corner of it to the other. “The police,” he said, “are our colleagues. We all have a stake in returning order to the community.”

Phil tried to reinforce the other man’s smile by also leering. “Back in high school, Dee,” he said, “they used to say you were a pretty easy lay.”

The universe branched; I would come home and find her raped and her throat slit and a leering note pinned to the blood-soaked body.

“I don’t give a fuck what they said,” she said. “They used to say you were a simple-minded asshole, too. Get the fuck off this property and stop intimidating my—my husband.”

I had to protest. “They’re not intimidating me, darling. We have an arrangement, from long before you showed up, if you don’t mind my pointing that out.”

Boys versus girls: how often that’s what it comes down to. Still, in this day and age.

Deirdre is like Gloria in that she gets excited—panics, really—when she feels her territory is being invaded. Her eyes, weirdly comic in their rings of green face cream, swivelled from one to another of us and then clamped shut; her mouth stretched sideways into a slit and the veins in her throat swelled as a terrible noise came out of her mouth, high like a siren but breathy, panting in little bursts. We all laughed, I the least heartily. “Darling,” I told her, “this is the way things are now, since the war. We’re all having to make new arrangements.”

Deirdre in her blind fury lowered her head and tried to butt at Spin’s and Phil’s bellies; Phil grabbed a fistful of curlers and black hair and held her like that, her arms swinging, while Spin looked at me, the toothpick dangling from the middle of his lip, and said, “This isn’t reasonable, Mr. Turnbull. We’re just doing the collecting. We don’t make the rules.”

“I know you don’t. I’ll get the money. Gloria, you calm down. I mean Deirdre.”

“You’re
with
these creeps!” she cried, her voice muffled as Phil bent her head to her chest. “Against
me!”

I raced upstairs, to where the bundles of Massachusetts tender were tucked beneath my folded undershirts. The old governor, with sepia hair and sleepy eyes, gazed out from the crude engraving. When the dollar exploded into worthlessness, not just states but corporations and hotel chains had to issue scrip. Ours has been holding its value pretty well lately, thanks to the revival of clamming and lobstering. With the plains a radioactive dust bowl, decimated Midwestern cities have been living on truckloads of New England mussels and apples from New York State.

The three interlopers had spaced themselves out on the driveway circle. Deirdre, putting her curlers back in place, was standing over by the euonymus bush, its brown chewed patches waist-high. Phil was sizing her up, wondering when to attempt a rapprochement. Spin was all business, standing just off the granite porch step; I handed him the money. The sepia bills looked worthless, with their rather supercilious engraved visage. Spin glanced at the welders but did not count them; he tucked the lot into his side coat pocket, taking care to smooth the pocket flap. He was jumping the season with a light checked sports jacket and dove-gray pegged slacks. He debonairly sniffed the air. “Next time we see you,” he promised, “the grass will be green.”

Phil pleaded with the back of Deirdre’s head, “You get good value, honest. Without us you’re totally vulnerable up here.”

She refused to turn or say a word. I glanced at the two strong-arm men and shrugged apologetically.

“Want a receipt, Mr. Turnbull?” Spin asked me.

“I trust you,” I said. “Take care.”

“Explain to your little lady,” Phil told me, “that the world’s changed. It ain’t what it used to be.”

“She knows it,” I said, feeling hostile now myself. It’s one thing to be held up, another to be forced to give your approval. It’s true, if they were not “protecting” me, somebody else would be. I actually have a pretty good life, compared with most of the people on this planet, in these sunset years of mine.

The sea earlier this March morning wore a look you never see in winter—a lakelike calm, a powdery blue so pale it was
scarcely blue, with stripes of a darker, stirred-up color that might have marked the passage of a lobster boat an hour before. The daylilies, in a rock-rimmed bed on the right side of the driveway as I walk down it, are up an inch or two, and the bulb plants on the sunny side of the white garage show thrusting shoots as close together as comb teeth. An occasional boat—motor, not sail—appears on the water, and in the woods there is a stir of trespassers—teenagers on dirt bikes, sub-teens sneaking smokes.

Last night, stepping out into the misty chill darkness in a failed attempt to see a comet that has lately been much in the
Globe
, I was hit by a true scent of spring—the caustic and repellent yet not totally unpleasant stink of a skunk. One never sees them, except as a mangled mess of black and white fur on the road. But the odor of their existences suddenly reaches us, even through the steel walls of a speeding car, alerting us to the hidden strata of animal existence, whose creatures move through coded masses of scent, through invisible clouds of information.

A curious dream last night, whose details fall from me even as I write. Gloria and I were leaving Boston after some event, some little concert or worthy talk, probably at the Tavern Club or her club, called, in honor of Caesar’s wife, the Calpurnia. The city, torn up by the Big Dig, could be exited only at “the top”—a narrow place of high traffic like the Mystic River Bridge. We were on foot, she leading. The mouth of a downward tunnel—an oneiric echo of the one under the old Charlestown circle, or the one named after a legendary baseball player—loomed confusingly, like the ambiguous exits off of Memorial Drive that suddenly shoot a car over the river or into Kendall Square. She led me to the right, along a concrete walk that stayed level—one of those ill-marked gritty passageways that skirt great new constructions.
Except that it seemed to proceed along the edge of buildings that fell away beside me, on the right, dizzyingly. Gloria moved along, with that brisk impatience and obliviousness of the comfortably born, and I timorously followed along the obscure path, which bent now and then as if tracing the ramparts of ancient city buildings: the analog perhaps is with those medieval pedestrian ways around Court Square, in the shadow of the ancient gray City Hall, now a Chinese-war memorial.