ever. “I don’t want to have to think about it. I don’t want you to have to think about it. Hey, this is a beautiful place you got here. Wood, though. Hundred-year-old wood, at least. Get to burning up on this hill, there’d be no stopping it. They don’t make fire hoses long enough.”
I intended to pay, but, as with insurance salesmen in the old days, or company representatives touting a public stock offering, I liked to tease them a little, to make them work for what we both knew was a societally condoned rip-off. “I don’t need so much house,” I told them. “With all the expense, I’m thinking of moving. It’s not as if I’m not still paying taxes on top of everything else.”
“Some taxes,” Spin coolly sneered. “Local and commonwealth. I can remember, so can you, when there were federal taxes, and the structure in place to enforce the collection. It was called the 1RS.”
I said, “There’s a lot of talk on the radio about starting it up again. A lot of people miss the federal government.”
“Fat chance,” Phil said, “after that dumbhead dust-up with the Chinks. They blew it.”
Deirdre heard the male voices on the lawn, in the front circle, and came out with her hair in curlers and green cream on her face. “You creeps ever think of getting lost?” she asked.
“Watch your mouth, Dee,” Phil said.
“You know Deirdre?” I asked.
Phil didn’t answer.
“We went to high school together,” she admitted. “He was a loser then, and he’s a loser now. What are they asking money for?”
“Protection,” I told her. “They see that no harm comes to me, despite the breakdown of law and order.”
“Ha!” she said. “These two jerks saying they’re the new law and order? Go inside and call the police, Ben. This is intimidation and threatened assault and arson and I don’t know what all else.”
“Are there still police?” I wondered aloud.
“Sure,” Deirdre said.
“You don’t see them standing guard at road repairs any more,” I pointed out, adding helpfully, “Maybe because there are no road repairs.”
“They’re too busy,” Deirdre said, “locking up crooked morons like this and throwing away the key.”
Spin contemplated her with a smile, shifting the toothpick from one corner of it to the other. “The police,” he said, “are our colleagues. We all have a stake in returning order to the community.”
Phil tried to reinforce the other man’s smile by also leering. “Back in high school, Dee,” he said, “they used to say you were a pretty easy lay.”
The universe branched; I would come home and find her raped and her throat slit and a leering note pinned to the blood-soaked body.
“I don’t give a fuck what they said,” she said. “They used to say you were a simple-minded asshole, too. Get the fuck off this property and stop intimidating my—my husband.”
I had to protest. “They’re not intimidating me, darling. We have an arrangement, from long before you showed up, if you don’t mind my pointing that out.”
Boys versus girls: how often that’s what it comes down to. Still, in this day and age.
Deirdre is like Gloria in that she gets excited—panics, really—when she feels her territory is being invaded. Her eyes, weirdly comic in their rings of green face cream, swivelled from one to another of us and then clamped shut; her mouth stretched sideways into a slit and the veins in her throat swelled as a terrible noise came out of her mouth, high like a siren but breathy, panting in little bursts. We all laughed, I the least heartily. “Darling,” I told her, “this is the way things are now, since the war. We’re all having to make new arrangements.”
Deirdre in her blind fury lowered her head and tried to butt at Spin’s and Phil’s bellies; Phil grabbed a fistful of curlers and black hair and held her like that, her arms swinging, while Spin looked at me, the toothpick dangling from the middle of his lip, and said, “This isn’t reasonable, Mr. Turnbull. We’re just doing the collecting. We don’t make the rules.”
“I know you don’t. I’ll get the money. Gloria, you calm down. I mean Deirdre.”
“You’re with these creeps!” she cried, her voice muffled as Phil bent her head to her chest. “Against me!”
I raced upstairs, to where the bundles of Massachusetts tender were tucked beneath my folded undershirts. The old governor, with sepia hair and sleepy eyes, gazed out from the crude engraving. When the dollar exploded into worthlessness, not just states but corporations