Halfway Home by Paul Monette

he'd ever admit he showed up here today for purposes of gauging the fallout. "I always wished I had an older brother."
    "Yes, well they're very overrated. I know they're supposed to tell you all about girls and keep bullies from stealing your marbles. In my case he was too busy pounding my head in the dirt."
    He's got the new latch in place, bright steel, biting a screw into the jamb. He grunts with satisfaction. "But doesn't it change, once you grow up?"
    "Ah, but I didn't grow up, so there you are."
    He's finished. He takes a midget whiskbroom from the toolbox and sweeps up the shavings. The job is perfect. Gray should be in charge of the MX missile. He stands with his box in hand, eyeballs his workmanship one more time, and steps outside. I follow in his wake.
    As we head up the grassy slope to the sycamore grove, I'm surprised at how much taller Gray is than I, three inches at least. His rounded shoulders and pulled-in neck make him look much shorter. He never wears sunglasses, so the squint lines around his eyes are deep troughs. Skin very weatherbeaten too, since he wouldn't dream of moisturizing. Still, his face has a craggy noble form, set off by the fine slope of his patrician nose. He reeks of old money.
    The sycamores are mostly bare, though the dead leaves cling in clumps on several branches, holding on to the old year. They're budded but won't come into leaf for another month, the closest thing to Connecticut here. We slog through piles of unraked leaves to the evergreen hedge beyond. Nobody's clipped these bushes lately either, so the arched entrance is nearly overgrown. Gray passes through first, holding the branches so they won't switch back in my face. Then we are in the green room.
    The hedge, maybe ten feet high, encloses a rectangle of ground on the high end of the bluff, perhaps twenty by forty. In the center is a rectangular pool edged with a coping of granite. The water is black, as if it goes down for miles, with two distinct clusters of water lilies at either end. From one of these springs a yellow flower wide as a man's hand.
    Gray kneels on the granite lip and peers in the water under the lilies. Then he reaches in and digs around and pulls out a ghastly clump of root and tendril, covered with brown scum. Gently he pulls it away, detaching it from the lilies. I move closer to see and nearly gasp with delight. For his churning and weeding—he's plunged in again—have sent the fishes racing. Orange and spotted, some two feet long, they whip and circle about in the midnight depths of the pool.
    Nobody knows how many there are, but I count eight. A couple have been replaced, but Gray says most have been here since the place was built. Which is why I call this the Chinese garden, because it's all mixed in my head with wizened old philosophers contemplating fish as old as the Ming dynasty. A white-flecked goldfish breaks the surface, showing a flash of tail.
    "They won't grow by the ocean, that's what everybody said. And that's why Nonny planted 'em." Gray's voice is mordant as he deposits another load of slop on the pile beside him.
    Honestly, it's like watching Mr. Wizard, or an eighth-grade science project: stuff you can find in mud. Gray is completely undaunted as he pokes and fiddles with things. Needless to say, it's a Sisyphean task, keeping up with the breakage and wearing-out of an old house, the overgrown flora of five acres. I don't quite understand why the Baldwin Foundation, the titular owner, doesn't pay for regular upkeep, just to protect the property value. But then I have never figured out the queer adversary relations between Gray and that pile of money. Gray doesn't seem to mind at all being handyman and underwoodsman. I can also see that he likes the company when I trail around after him.
    The nasty job is done. There's a grisly pile of roots and muck on either side of him now, and he grumbles that he'll wait for it to dry out before he shovels it up. "Haul it over to the compost," he