“We have a saying in business,” I told them. “Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
Manolete, perhaps the brightest as well as the youngest, said in his abrupt, small-boy, explosive way, “Only eggs they layin’ is tellin’ us to get the hell off they fuckin’ property.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Kelly,” Ray interposed, “were reasonable. We show them your letter. They say O.K., they’d contribute something, but only a part of what you paid, since they only have three acres to your eleven.”
He was learning the language, I thought. “Tell them,” I said, “that that may be so but there are six of them and only two Turnbulls. Maybe mention casually that you would hate to see any of their children kidnapped; ransom costs a lot more than protection.”
They took this in, the three brown faces in the sun-slit gloom of their fragile little shelter. José volunteered, “Those Dunhams, they didn’t come up with nothin’. They treated us like dirt. He has his own guns, the cocksucker said.”
The Dunhams were a perfect couple, unless one considered childlessness a flaw. Their impeccable mock-colonial house, visible in winter, lay hidden in the leafy woods not two hundred yards from Gloria’s back garden. Athletic into their fifties, they matched like salt and pepper shakers. Both lithe, both forever smiling though faintly formal even in jogging outfits, their skins glowing with the same shade of suntan, their hair tinged with exactly the same becoming amount of gray, they came from old New England families with about the same amount of money and cachet. The world’s woes, and the woes that parenthood brings, had passed them by; there was a polished, impervious beauty about them that one itched to mar. Their only point of vulnerability was their animals. They had two prize Persian cats, a perfectly trimmed miniature poodle, and a piebald pony who grazed in summer in a little meadow carved from their section of the woods.
“You might think about killing one of their cats,” I told the boys. “They let them out in the morning for exercise and to do their business in the shrubs. Just kill one, leave the body on the porch, and show up for collection the next day. You don’t have to admit to anything, just don’t deny it either. If they don’t pay up then, do the dog, that damned yappy poodle. The horse-before you kill him, get some spray paint and paint his side. If he holds still for it, paint in numbers your monthly charge. Like an invoice on legs.”
In our box of artificial twilight, with its smells of tobacco smoke and sweaty mattress and pine needles masked by plywood, the boys broke into laughter at my wealth of malice.
“Any ideas how we should handle Mrs. Lubbetts?” Ray asked.
I was enjoying this. I loved these willing boys, so superior, in their readiness and accessibility, to my own grandsons.
Pearl Lubbetts was a Jewish widow-Earl Lubbetts had made his pile in potato chips and packaged popcorn-who had taken on over the years the imperious, lockjawed, rough-and-ready manner of a Wasp matriarch. She was usually dressed in Wellingtons and muddy-kneed dungarees, directing teams of local workers on one or another project of excavation, forestry, resodding, or masonry. She had built a private sea-wall to protect her front lawn from the tides, and at a far corner of her property had constructed a modernist beach house which was, as it happened, the only structure in my seaward view, summer and winter. She had cleared the surrounding trees, so nothing impeded my sight line; with its bleached redwood siding and flat white Florida-style roof and its sundeck balustrade like a bone comb, it was an unignorable blot on my view. Metal and glass elements on the roof and walls-flashing, skylights, twirling vents, and complicated tin chimney guards- beamed irritating glints into my visual field, unanswerable emergency signals from the edge of the sea; no matter what the hour between sunrise and sunset, some reflective angle boldly bounced photons right through my windows into my retinas.
“You could burn down her little beach house,” I suggested. “That should give her the idea that you are serious individuals. When you go to collect,” it occurred to me to add, “you might want to wear suits, or at least a jacket and tie. It makes a world of difference, credibilitywise.”
The boys consulted with one another in silent glances. Triangles of white flickered beside their shifting irises.
“Hey, how come you tellin’ us all this stuff?” Ray asked me.
“I like you young fellas. I want you to succeed.”
“What’s in it for you?”
I let a beat of silence go by. “How about twenty percent?” I said.
“Ten plenty,” José said.
Ray’s eyes flicked sideways in surprise at being supplanted as negotiator.
“Ten on the protection, twenty on the admission fees tomorrow,” I offered.
Ray took back the role of spokesman. “How you know we not be cheatin’ you?” he asked.
“The sad way things are in the world now, we all have to work through trust. I trust you, it’s that simple,” I told them.
José, the biggest, was the one to rise, extend his broad but soft hand, and say, “It’s a deal.”
iv. The Deaths
INDEPENDENCE DAY: my American flag flapped noisily on the pole in an east wind off the sea. For a time it was tangled in its cord and twittered like an insect with one wing stuck on flypaper, until I loped across the lawn and lowered the striped and starred cloth and sent it back up the halyard free. Out there on the blue width of water, sailboats tilted in the morning breeze and sleek white stinkpots gathered on the evening calm to see the fireworks sent up from the public end of the beach. You could hear the sounds and music of beery parties already in progress. I wondered how my boys were doing collecting tolls along the path. Downtown, around the convenience store, white boys in droopy loose shirts and shorts and girls in tighter foxy duds watched the holiday seep away like spilled soda on hot concrete. The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs. Sometimes I think the thing I’ll mind about death is not so much not being alive but nc longer being an American. Even for the losers there is a liberation in the escape from divine order.
In Gloria’s rose bed the blooms, so red and white and pink against the sea, are tired, their blown petals littering the smoothly mounded mulch of buckwheat hulls; but her back garden is profuse with odd-shaped flowers I cannot name. Yarrow? Artemisia? Snapdragons and nasturtiums in any case, nasturtiums with a curious flower-shaped blazon on their petals, the dirty tint of a tattoo. The clematis on the sunny side of the garden shed is amazing, clambering on its quick red stems up the lattice I had made and drenching the clapboards in a density of lush purple flowers banded like church vestments. Gloria cuts it down to a virtual stump every spring, and her faith is always rewarded.
Within the garage, the barn swallows, so slow to start their nest, have in a few weeks’ time hatched their eggs. It happened today: the air was suddenly full of careening baby birds. They fly swervingly up and down, on the edge of control, like children first on a bicycle. There are three, and they rest from their adventure perched on the wooden gutter of the house as tightly together as if still packed in the nest, frightened by all the transparent space around them. Gloria and I had observed them, as we passed in and out of the garage, from the day they were hatchlings, blind mouths held preposterously wide open above the nest’s edge, their tiny bald bodies wholly devoted to the strain and distension of sudden post-ovum appetite. Tirelessly the dapper mother and father dipped back and forth across the lawn and shrub planting, harvesting invisible insects. In a mere two weeks the helpless and hideous babies have been fed into feathers and wingpower enough to be launched, blue-backed and roseate-bellied, as darting, dipping predators in their own right.