Toward the End of Time Read Free

destroy everything. Just to get at me.”
    “Not at all,” I protested, yet so feebly the possible truth of her assertion would continue to gall her.
    “If we got a gun, would you shoot it then?”
    The cold air was sifting through my pajamas. The morning Globe was down by the mailbox, waiting to be retrieved. “Probably not.” Yet I wasn’t sure. In my youth in the Berkshires, those erosion-diminished, tourist-ridden green hills,I had handled a .22 owned by a friend less impoverished than I. There had been a thrill to it—the slender weight, the acrid whiff, the long-distance effect.
    She sensed this uncertainty, and pried into it the wedge of her voice. “The homeowner can , you know. Out of season or anything, as long as it’s on his property. Shoot any pest. That’s the law.”
    “I’d be scared,” I told her, knowing it would sting, “to shoot a neighbor. Talk about money, honey—what a lawsuit!”

    That night, we planned to go to bed de bonne heure , to make love. In our old age we had to carefully schedule copulations that once had occurred spontaneously, without forethought or foreboding. Before heading upstairs, she said, “Let’s look out the window, to see if the deer has come back.”
    The yard was dark, with the thinnest kind of cloud-veiled moonlight. My wife saw nothing and turned to go up to bed. Once I would have given all my assets, including my body’s health and my children’s happiness, to go to bed with her, and even now it was a pleasant prospect. But, damn my eyes, I saw a black hump sticking up from the curved euonymus hedge, whose top was crusted with hardened snow. The black shadow moved—changed shape like an amoeba in the dirty water of the dark, or like some ectoplasmic visitation from a former inhabitant of our venerable house. “Honey, he’s eating the hedge,” I said softly.
    My wife screamed, “He is! Do something! Damn you, don’t just stand there smiling!”
    How could she know I was smiling? The living room was as dark as the front lawn with its ghostly herbivore.
    “I’m calling the Pientas! It’s not too late! It’s not even eight-thirty! I’m going to borrow Charlie’s gun! We’ve got to do something, and you won’t do anything!”
    The Pientas live fifteen minutes away. Louise is a Garden Club friend of Gloria’s; Charlie has that Old World-peasant mentality which loves the American right to bear arms. He owns several shotguns, for ducks mostly, and my wife, having hurled herself and her teal-blue Japanese station wagon into the dark, brought one of Charlie’s guns back with her, with a cardboard box half full of ammunition. The church bell down in the village was tolling nine. “I’ll prop it right here behind the armchair,” she said, “and we’ll keep the bullets—”
    “Shells.”
    “—shells on the bench in the upstairs hall. Charlie does that to keep children from putting them together.”
    We were in too jangled a mood to attempt love; we read instead, and then kept waking each other up, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Though she is younger, her bladder is graciously weakening along with mine. It was still dark when she woke me in a voice between a tender sexual whisper and the whimper of a terrified child. “Ben! He’s eating the euonymus again! Hurry! I’ve assembled your socks and boots and overcoat.”
    I had been dreaming of photographs, of life-moments that were photographs and had been placed in a marketing brochure for a mutual fund that called for them to be reduced to the size of postage stamps, though they were in full color. I couldn’t quite make them out. My children by my former marriage? Their children? I was a grandfather ten times over. I wondered about the printing costs and determined to report my reservations to Firman Frothingham, the one of my colleagues at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise givento such unseemly wooing of the general public. As Gloria insistently woke me I realized, with a twist in