Part 5 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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, brus.h.i.+ng 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-s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.h.i.+fted 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.”