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