Part 5 (2/2)

”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 s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+ngled 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+mmered 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt 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, fas.h.i.+onable 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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, wis.h.i.+ng 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, ”swis.h.i.+ng” 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 s.h.i.+rts, 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 s.h.i.+rts, 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 relations.h.i.+p.

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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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.”

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