Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  There was a pleasure, actually, in slicing up the helpless tree, amputating inwards, as the severed limbs accumulated 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 Shore: 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, brushing 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 orgasmically 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—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 cumbersome 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 spaces, and plug the pompous three-prong 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 trespassers 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 scraps 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 space, 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 breasts perking up her cotton T-shirt. 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 competition. 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 shifted 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 document.”

  “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 document that Spin has signed.”

  “We don’t go so much by documents,” 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 shifted 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 shingled 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 associate 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.”

  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 passed 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 titanically 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 hassle 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. 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 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 cocked 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 cocktail-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 shift 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 semen stain when she made the bed. I would become again an inhibited pubescent lying sleepless and scared of unseen powers in that narrow house on the hill above Hammond Falls.

  I doubted that Doreen sensed my lust, 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 sex 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-assertion 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 bumper 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 orbit. 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 shimmered 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.