and hotel chains had to issue scrip. Ours has been holding its value pretty well lately, thanks to the revival of clamming and lobstering. With the plains a radioactive dust bowl, decimated Midwestern cities have been living on truckloads of New England mussels and apples from New York State.
The three interlopers had spaced themselves out on the driveway circle. Deirdre, putting her curlers back in place, was standing over by the euonymus bush, its brown chewed patches waist-high. Phil was sizing her up, wondering when to attempt a rapprochement. Spin was all business, standing just off the granite porch step; I handed him the money. The sepia bills looked worthless, with their rather supercilious engraved visage. Spin glanced at the welders but did not count them; he tucked the lot into his side coat pocket, taking care to smooth the pocket flap. He was jumping the season with a light checked sports jacket and dove-gray pegged slacks. He debonairly sniffed the air. “Next time we see you,” he promised, “the grass will be green.”
Phil pleaded with the back of Deirdre’s head, “You get good value, honest. Without us you’re totally vulnerable up here.”
She refused to turn or say a word. I glanced at the two strong-arm men and shrugged apologetically.
“Want a receipt, Mr. Turnbull?” Spin asked me.
“I trust you,” I said. “Take care.”
“Explain to your little lady,” Phil told me, “that the world’s changed. It ain’t what it used to be.”
“She knows it,” I said, feeling hostile now myself. It’s one thing to be held up, another to be forced to give your approval. It’s true, if they were not “protecting” me, somebody else would be. I actually have a pretty good life, compared with most of the people on this planet, in these sunset years of mine.
The sea earlier this March morning wore a look you never see in winter—a lakelike calm, a powdery blue so pale it was scarcely blue, with stripes of a darker, stirred-up color that might have marked the passage of a lobster boat an hour before. The daylilies, in a rock-rimmed bed on the right side of the driveway as I walk down it, are up an inch or two, and the bulb plants on the sunny side of the white garage show thrusting shoots as close together as comb teeth. An occasional boat—motor, not sail—appears on the water, and in the woods there is a stir of trespassers—teenagers on dirt bikes, sub-teens sneaking smokes.
Last night, stepping out into the misty chill darkness in a failed attempt to see a comet that has lately been much in the Globe, I was hit by a true scent of spring—the caustic and repellent yet not totally unpleasant stink of a skunk. One never sees them, except as a mangled mess of black and white fur on the road. But the odor of their existences suddenly reaches us, even through the steel walls of a speeding car, alerting us to the hidden strata of animal existence, whose creatures move through coded masses of scent, through invisible clouds of information.
A curious dream last night, whose details fall from me even as I write. Gloria and I were leaving Boston after some event, some little concert or worthy talk, probably at the Tavern Club or her club, called, in honor of Caesar’s wife, the Calpurnia. The city, torn up by the Big Dig, could be exited only at “the top”—a narrow place of high traffic like the Mystic River Bridge. We were on foot, she leading. The mouth of a downward tunnel—an oneiric echo of the one under the old Charlestown circle, or the one named after a legendary baseball player—loomed confusingly, like the ambiguous exits off of Memorial Drive that suddenly shoot a car over the river or into Kendall Square. She led me to the right, along a concrete walk that stayed level—one of those ill-marked gritty passageways that skirt great new constructions. Except that it seemed to proceed along the edge of buildings that fell away beside me, on the right, dizzyingly. Gloria moved along, with that brisk impatience and obliviousness of the comfortably born, and I timorously followed along the obscure path, which bent now and then as if tracing the ramparts of ancient city buildings: the analog perhaps is with those medieval pedestrian ways around Court Square, in the shadow of the ancient gray City Hall, now a Chinese-war memorial.
Gloria did not acknowledge the screaming depths of vertical façade and jutting cornice beneath us,