“O.K., I guess.” She didn’t sound convinced.
Manolete, named, was liberated into one of his sudden large gestures, sweeping a hand toward the ceiling, whose tint seemed to hold us at the bottom of a dirty swimming pool. “A lot of old clients from Spin and Phil, they say, Tuck off.’ They say, ‘Show me.’ ”
“Well, you showed me” I pointed out.
Doreen, not to be excluded from our male conversation, volunteered, “They’ve been killing the people’s pet dogs and cats and leaving them at the front door, but a lot of these rich people say all the same they don’t want to pay anything.”
“People are selfish,” I told them. “What you need to do in an operation like yours,” I went on, “is to establish trust. Phil and Spin, people trusted them. They didn’t necessarily like them, but they could relate to them. You all have the disadvantage, may I say, of seeming a little young.”
Manolete’s arm darted toward me like a sword. “Young, we show them young. We got the guns, and we don’t give no fucking damn no how!”
“Well said,” I said. “But what you need, to convince people like me, is something written. I know people your age hardly even bother to learn how to read, but that’s how the people you want to convince deal with one another. With something in writing. Suppose I were to give you an endorsement. It would go something like, ‘I, Benjamin Turn-bull, of this address et cetera, hereby declare that these young entrepreneurs and enforcers of order have supplied their services to me in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. What they promise, they deliver, so help me God. These fine young men can be trusted.’ How does that sound?”
“It sounds like real old-time bullshit,” Manolete said, but with a smile, here underwater.
Doreen asked, “Why would you do that for us?”
Her torn jeans and loose T-shirt and rough short haircut did not conceal that at thirteen going on fourteen she had the beginnings of a figure. Slender pliant waist, budding breasts. At one end of the fertile continuum Beatrice was at the other of. “I like you,” I said. “You’ve brought some fresh faces into my lonely life. And you’re repelling trespassers for me, right?”
“‘Pay or go away,’ we tell the ones on the way to the beach,” Manolete said, with one of his pent-up gestures.
“Exactly,” I said. “Also, it seems to me, if I gave you such a written endorsement to establish your credibility in the neighborhood I might be entitled to a discount.”
“Discount?” Doreen asked. “How much?”
“Oh… what would be fair? Let’s say ten-no, fifteen- percent. Fifteen percent off the monthly charge. Don’t answer me now. Take it up with the other two. But point out to Ray and José that it’s the only way to get their racket on a respectable footing. I would write the endorsement in blue ink on my engraved stationery, that would show everybody it was authentic.”
Mosquitoes, as the long June afternoon slipped into damp shadow here on the eastern side of the hill, were finding their way through gaps in the netting. I slapped several as they approached my ear. Odd, that I who cannot bear to kill a spider, and used to hate it when one would suicidally crawl into the wet paint of some home repair, am heartless about mosquitoes, though they are all prospective mothers seeking a drop of blood to nurture their progeny. That telltale whine of theirs-I wonder why evolution has failed to silence it, through the survival of the unsinging. But evolution has its curious perversities and warps and failures to deliver the obvious. “You need bug repellent,” I said, standing but taking care not to hit my head on the translucent corrugated roof.
“We got it,” Doreen said, less friendly as the light clammily ebbed from this fragile space of shelter. “But it doesn’t work worth squat on those ticking things.”
“I squash ’em,” Manolete boasted again.
Gloria must be back from Boston or wherever she has been. I could hear through the trees the surging motors of cars, but whether on our driveway or elsewhere I couldn’t tell. The acoustics of this hill have always been deceptive. Conversations at the gas station downtown sound as if they were just outside the kitchen window, whereas in my study upstairs-my journal-keeping room-I fail to hear the FedEx truck come up the driveway. By the time its roar strikes my ear the heedless truck is around the curve by the daylily bed and out of sight, having knocked one more low-hanging branch off the hemlock.
“And you have a cooler for drinks, I see,” I said, spotting the white of Styrofoam glowing in a corner of the other room. “For a modest fee, I might let you string up electricity from a plug in my garage. It would take a lot of extension cords, but you could have a fan, and a lamp, and even a little refrigerator. Not free, of course.”
“Hey, Big Guy,” the boy said. “We like it the way it is. The way it is, it’s our own thing.”
That “Big Guy” had been worth the slippery trip into the woods to hear.
The longest day of the year 2020 A.D. happened to be rainy and misty, its early dawn and extended dusk hidden in a white wet mass of droplets. The day was a long pallid worm arching up out of darkness and back again. The paper as I write curls limply and rejects the abrasion of the graphite.
In Gloria’s garden, the peonies are already rather blown and by, though a few buds, their tightly packed silks stained as if tie-dyed, still wait to unfold. The huge white ones have scattered edges and spots of vermillion like bloody clues. The two-toned lupines are by, but the towering foxgloves are at their peak, as are yellow columbines, delicate dancing minikins that seem to disavow any connection with their stems. Bouncing Bet has escaped from the borders to mingle with the weeds out by the old hotbeds, which have been reduced by time to a rubble of broken glass and dried putty.
She cut some roses from the rounded bed toward the sea and won a number of second-place ribbons at the June Garden Club competition. I think she would have won first if she had waited a few more hours to cut her entries, which had opened too wide by the time of the evening judging. The contest is not so much for growing as for cutting. Now the contestants sit about the kitchen in water glasses, as opulent as old actresses, and the ribbons dangle in the library, their strings pinched between the six volumes of Winston Churchill’s history of the last great war but one.
I made an obligatory, multipurposed excursion to Boston. There was a plethora of bare flesh in the train and in North Station and even the streets of the financial district, along its seam with the tourist traps and juvenilia of Quincy Market. Some tans were already ripe and hardened; young female buttocks, poking their hemispheres below the fringed hems of their radically abbreviated denim cut-offs, exposed here and there a pastel rim, shaped like a new moon, of bikini underpants. I thought of Deirdre.
And yet, by and large, how hideous people are! In Mass. General Ambulatory Care Center, where my dermatologist made his semi-annual harvest of my keratoses, sizzling them away with painful squirts of liquid nitrogen, none but the obese, the cankered, the demented, and the crippled crowded into the elevator with me. In the corner of my vision, faces scrambled, so that I had the distinct impression of a much-grafted and patched-together burn victim standing beside me, his face a chaos of ridges and blotches. But when I sneaked a glance in focus, his face was unscarred, and twenty years younger than my sun-damaged own. I practiced my new trick: by focusing mentally on a face in the side of my vision, I was able to generate an impression of swarming deformity on all sides of me, as if I were ascending in an elevator crammed with mutants or ghastly damaged survivors of the recent great war, their raw surfaces radioactive, their mutilation beyond plastic surgery.