On the weekends they smacked each other around. Of course, this hurt a bit and even left marks. But after the indifference of the workweek, this unquestionably manly bit of mayhem was most of all plain stimulating. Often in between the smacking around, they fucked. In those early years they would never have said (if pressed) they were “making love.” Making love! These two big galoots? Known to their friends on the wrecking crew as “Jim” and “Jimmy” respectively (though each of their names was legally “James”, as the department that processed their pay checks could verify), love never entered their thick heads, so what else could they be doing but “fucking”? — except they would never have mentioned each other to anyone else to ever say anything about, and never did.

And to be honest, no neutral eye (had there ever been such an eye to spy on what they did to each other when at last they were together alone) would ever have pronounced the dynamic acts they engaged in to be “making love” but “fucking”, intensely and often, whenever in fact they were not eating or sleeping or smacking each other around. And that was enough — more than enough. On many a bleak midweek night, anticipation of the smacking around (and to be honest, the fucking) of the weekend to come was the only clear comfort each man could hold close to himself as he drifted to restless sleep in his single bed.

In the later years the fucking persisted even after the smacking around had subsided to a dim whimper of its former howling self. In these twilight years the fucking, which at the dawn of their knowing each other had been the balm applied to flesh aggravated from all that smacking around, became instead the outlet for the inevitable aggression that prolonged proximity engenders and now had no escape valve other than the fucking, the only real glue that was holding them (loosely) together now that they were seeing other people as well, many other people over the years, many, many— of whom neither ever breathed so much as a word to the other.

But well before the end, retired now from the punishing physical labor that had worn out each of them early (even as, to the neutral eye, it had kept them in something like fighting trim), so constitutionally weakened had they each become that neither man ever felt their feeble poking (that they would never call “fucking” now but in fact still was) as aggression of any kind but as the love that all their unspeakable acts had for decades also undeniably always been the fleshy tokens of, and now as well (they each with all their diminished strength avidly hoped) would evermore always be. Yes, finally, it struck them both, love.