Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction) Read online

  Marlon, it turned out, was no threat at all. He had a mental age of nine, and was inclined toward violence only in private, isolated circumstances—if someone inadvertently got between him and a plate of food, for instance. He was massive. A barely contained spillage of viscid flesh, titanic, crushing, monumental. But puerile. Dangerous only in potentio. He stepped over me, feet like showshoes, bellied up to the bar and asked, in the pinched, whining tones of the preadolescent, for a Coke.

  “Hey-hey,” Sapers said, clucking away in some orphic backwoods code, as he staggered forward to help me to my feet. Shirelle was standing beside George Pete, who looked abashed. He apologized, and shook hands with me, but wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Guess I’ve had one too many,” he mumbled, zipping his lumberjacket, shoving through the door and vanishing into the night.

  Gesh eased his cuestick into the wall rack, buttoned his torn trench coat and said, “Let’s hit it, Felix. Come on.” He had a hand on my elbow. Sapers had cringed and backed off a step when Gesh advanced on us, then turned his head and shouted something about the weather to George Pete’s toothless comrade, who was no more than two feet away from him. My ear throbbed.

  I felt vague and disoriented, as if my blood had somehow evaporated. Phil, his face solemn, gathered my money from the bar and held out my coat.

  “Bye, honey,” Shirelle said as we made for the door.

  I looked back over my shoulder at the figures stationed round the room, Shirelle lushly replicated in her daughter, the slouching, twitching Sapers, George Pete’s wizened cohort, the Indians gliding in brilliant liquid motion over the pool table, and Marlon, mountainous, his big pale glowing visage hanging over the scene like a planetary orb. No one looked particularly sympathetic.

  “Could I please have another Coke?” Marlon piped.

  The door was swinging to. I heard Sapers’s shout, indistinct, competing with the jukebox and the clatter of glasses—I couldn’t be sure but I thought he was hollering about crops, now’s the time to get them crops into the ground, or something like that. Boom, the door slammed. Faintly, from within, I could still hear him: “Drunks!” he shouted. “Hypocrites!”

  Then it was quiet. But for the hiss of the rain.

  “Oh, Christ,” Phil said.

  It was dark. The rain fell in cataracts. We ran for the pickup, sloshing through ankle-deep puddles, everything a blur. We should have walked. There was something in our urgency, in the frantic quickening pace of our legs, that triggered a corresponding impulse in the all-but-forgotten hyena-dog that had stared so implacably at us as we entered the bar, and had waited patiently through the decline of day and the onset of the steady chilling rain for just such an opportunity as this. I was halfway to the truck when a silent lunging form streaked from the shadows and fastened itself to my pant leg with a predatory snarl. Tripped up, I pitched forward into the darkness with a splash, aware of mud, water, the exploratory grip of jaws. And then I was face down in the rank wet dirt, rolling and tumbling like a man afire, flinging up first one arm and then the other as the dog raged over me in an allegro furioso of snapping teeth and stuttering growls. “Rimmer!” a voice shouted close by. George Pete’s voice. “You get out of that now!” And the dog was gone.

  A mere twenty seconds had been extracted from my life. The violent conjunction of bodies, the interrupted flight, the accelerated heartbeat, the mud, the torn clothing, the raising of welts and breaking of skin—the assault was over before it began. I pushed myself up and limped to the truck, my sleeves shredded and pants flapping. Phil and Gesh were huddled inside. The engine roared, wipers clapped. “What the hell happened to you?” Phil said as I pulled myself into the cab like a flood victim flinging himself over the gunwales of the rescue boat. What could I say? Talk was cheap. I shrugged my shoulders.

  Back at the summer camp, I took one look at Dowst’s censorious face and told him to go fuck himself. Then I dabbed my wounds with alcohol and slogged out to help my co-workers evacuate ruptured sacks of groceries in the grass and haul dissolving bags of manure to the storage shed. It was no fun. At one point Phil turned to me, rain in our faces, cans of beets, niblet corn and garden-fresh peas at our feet, the sorry scraps of superstrength, double-bottomed bags in our hands. “Okay, so we screwed up,” he said. “I’ll be the first to admit it.” The flashlight picked out a soggy loaf of French bread at my feet. Rain sifted through the trees. “We screwed up,” Phil repeated, “but at least we had a good time.”

  Chapter 5

  Oiled, glistening, wicked, they lay on the table in grim tableau, in the sort of menacing still life you see in the newspapers under the headline ARSENAL SEIZED. Guns. Three of them. A .22, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and the most lethal-looking thing I’d seen outside of the reptile house at the San Francisco Zoo, a .357 magnum pistol.

  “You can’t be too careful,” Vogelsang said, grinning his diseased grin. He was wearing a one-piece khaki jumpsuit, boot to throat, the kind of thing favored by astronauts or kiddies toddling off to bed. The gloves, hood and gauze face mask were neatly arranged on the crate beside him. Aorta, in a sheeny metallic jacket, was watching me as I fingered the weapons.

  It was lunchtime. Soup was boiling over on the stove, the windows were steamed up. Our guests had just stepped through the door, weapons bristling, commandos on a raid. Vogelsang greeted me by name, nodded at Phil and Gesh, then spread the firearms out on the table. Phil hovered over the blistered wooden counter, masticating a bologna sandwich with the intensity of a beaver felling trees, and Gesh, sweat-stained and filthy, was propped up on the couch with a beer. Dowst was in the green house, where he’d been all morning, planting seeds in twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups.

  “So how’s the moon launch going?” I said.

  Vogelsang gave me a blank look, then grinned and tugged at the front of his jumpsuit. “You mean this?” he said. “Poison oak. I get it like the bubonic plague and leprosy wrapped in one.”

  I hefted the shotgun judiciously, sighted down the barrel like a sharpshooter. Actually, I’d only fired a gun once in my life. Eleven years old, a Boy Scout for two months (after which I quit: too much marching and knot-tying), I lay on my belly in the dirt and clicked off round after round at a bull’s-eye target. I remembered the firecracker smell, the snap of the report, the quick thin puff of smoke. The scoutmaster leaned over me, his face stubbled with whiskers, and breathed terse commands in my ear. “Sight,” he whispered. “A hair to the left. Squeeze.”

  The gun was surprisingly heavy, the trigger light: death instantaneous and irrevocable. “Do we really need this sort of thing?” I said, trying to sound casual. “I mean, a pistol that could blind an elephant—isn’t that a bit excessive?”

  Gesh grunted. I couldn’t tell whether it was a grunt of disparagement or agreement. I glanced at him. He was sipping beer, eyes squinted over the tight high cheekbones. I knew the look: he was sorting things out, ordering the priority of his grievances before opening up on Vogelsang.

  Vogelsang laughed. He’d led patrols in Vietnam, shot people from cover, garroted underfed Asians in secrecy and silence. “Look, Felix, you’re going to have a million and a half dollars’ worth of pot out there. Not only do you have to worry about the law, but you’ve always got the possibility that some hunter or one of these dirtbaggers will blunder across it. What would you do in their place? You know, out in the woods, poking around—maybe even looking for an illegal operation? I know what I’d do. I’d take it, no questions asked.”

  If at some point I’d glamorized the outlaw life, the romance of the scam and all the rest, if at some point I’d pictured myself a latter-day Capone or Dillinger or Bugsy Malone, I suddenly saw the stark and nasty underside of the whole operation. Guns. I’d never imagined I would have to defend myself with a gun. Quit, a voice whispered in my ear. Get out now.

  Vogelsang was studying my face, grinning still. He was enjoying this. “Come on, Felix,” he said. “Really, it’s no big deal.” He paused to produce the ever-prese
nt vial of breath neutralizer, working it rapidly between his palms as if he were starting a friction fire. “Chances are maybe one in a hundred that any-body’ll come around. But don’t you want some insurance if they do?”

  What could I say? Vogelsang was pooh-poohing me, Aorta regarded me appraisingly, Phil and Gesh seemed to accept the presence of firearms as casually as they accepted the pork cheeks in bologna or the nitrites in beer. I was a man, a dope farmer, an outlaw and a flimflammer. The gun was as much a tool of my trade as the come-along or spade, and I would just have to get used to it. I shrugged.

  Meanwhile, splayed out on the couch, his eyes like coiled snakes, Gesh had apparently sorted out his various complaints and decided to make his presence known. Suddenly he crushed the empty beer can in one callused fist and sent it rocketing across the room like a three-and-two fastball; it hit the kitchen wall with a cowbell clank, and rebounded neatly into an overflowing bag of garbage. Four heads turned toward him. “Listen, Herb,” he said, a peremptory edge to his voice, “I think we got a few things to discuss, brother, and guns is the least of them.”

  Here we go, I thought. I could feel the dollars slipping from my pocket, the seedlings wilting, the clash of personality like an early frost, an ill wind, like blight and scale and rot. Vogelsang cocked his head and leaned forward, his lips tight with a thin bemused smile. He could have been a headmaster bending an ear to an ingenuous and sadly misinformed pupil.

  “First of all,” Gesh said, his voice strangled with the effort to control it, “I don’t like this business of you sniffing wine corks down at Vanessi’s and la-de-dahing around Bolinas while we’re busting our asses up here with no electricity and broken-down equipment, in the fucking rain, freezing our balls off, and then the quote expert shows up a week and a half late, and you, you come waltzing in the door like this was a costume ball at the Lions’ Club or something. …”

  Phil was licking mustard from his fingers, both irises locked in alert alignment, while Aorta, unconcerned, a creature of another species, insentient, slow-blooded, ducked through the doorway with sacks of groceries and laid them on the counter like the offerings they were. Gesh’s voice nagged on, expressing deep and insupportable disaffection with everything, from lack of direction and equipment to the leaky roof and the holes in his boots and underwear. I could see the lines being drawn, the sides forming up: slaves and overseers, coolies and satraps, workers and bosses.

  Yes, you know when I begin to farm,

  My old boss be didn’t want to furnish me,

  He bad one mule name’ Jack, an’ one name’ Trigger,

  All the money for him an’ none for the nigger.

  So could Vogelsang. He was nervous, hyperkinetic, scratching round the room like a dog looking for a place to squat. Pursing his lips, he did his best to look thoughtful and conciliatory—contrite, even. When Gesh finally wound down, Vogelsang parried with sympathy, promises, a waved fistful of cash—he actually extracted a roll of bills from his pocket and waved it like a flag of truce—and a pep talk worthy of Winston Churchill in his finest hour. He planned to stay for the next six days—at least, he said. He’d brought groceries, supplies, equipment, booze, cash, pot, a Monopoly board, cheap paperbacks, a four-wheel-drive vehicle. “And Boyd,” he said, summing up, delivering the clincher, “Boyd’s planning to stay on without a break until all the seedlings are in the ground and the growing areas enclosed.”

  “Seedlings, shit,” Gesh growled, but I could see that he was mollified. In the space of three minutes Vogelsang had managed to reassure us that we hadn’t been neglected, that he’d foreseen everything and was prepared to lay out the capital to meet all our needs, and that, most important, our project was not doomed to failure, not at all—no, this was just the beginning. Everything was all right. We were going to make it. We were going to beat the system. We were going to be rich.

  And then, seeing his opening, Vogelsang took the offensive. “I might remind you, friend,” he said, his words diced as if by a dozen quick knife-strokes, “that I’m the one who’s putting up the capital for this little venture, and that I’m under no obligation to be up here at all. In fact, once things get rolling, you’re going to see less and less of me.”

  “Less?” Gesh lurched out of the chair. He stopped three feet short of Vogelsang, jabbing his index finger at him. “You tell me: what’s less than nothing?”

  The smile was frozen to Vogelsang’s face. For an instant something flickered in his eyes, something like emotion, but he killed it.

  And then Phil was stepping between them like a rodeo clown, shuffling his feet and ducking his shoulders. His mouth was full and we couldn’t catch what he was saying at first, but he was bowing and sweeping his arm in a grand comic gesture. Then he swallowed, hefted the blackened pot from the stove and set it down on the table. “Soup’s on,” he said.

  There were two and a half gallons of soup. Unidentifiable chunks of meat or vegetable matter bobbed in a greasy slick that reeked of black pepper and garlic. It was food, that’s all that mattered. We crowded round the caldron like the half-starved bricklayers of Ivan Denisovich, ravenous after a long morning of physical labor. Hands grabbed for bread, spoons, bowls. Vogelsang, I assumed, would decline to join us.

  I was wrong. He dipped his bowl into the pot like a true son of the proletariat, squatted down before the stove, and broke bread with us. Perhaps he didn’t have the faintest idea of how people related to one another, perhaps the quotidian range of human emotion was an enigma to him, but there was no denying this: he knew how to take charge of the situation.

  After lunch, Vogelsang tinkered with the generator for ten minutes or so and then fired it up with a sudden blatting roar that obliterated the solitude of the hills and froze my heart like a block of ice. “Shut it off,” I screamed, bursting from the house, where the lightbulbs had begun to glow dimly. He glanced up at me, then leaned over and shorted the spark plug with a plastic-grip screwdriver. “Works fine,” he said.

  “But the noise—they’ll hear it for miles. It’s like Pearl Harbor or something.” (I could picture the town sheriff spilling his coffee every time we started the thing up. “What the sufferin’ Jesus is that?” he asks the basset-faced deputy. “It’s them city boys,” the deputy says, “up on the old Gayeff place. Lloyd Sapers says they’re growin’ corn or somethin’ out the side of a mountain. What you make of that, Ormand?”)

  Vogelsang stood. “Yes, well—you’ve got a problem there. Maybe you could use it sparingly, huh?”

  Then he was off with Dowst for a tour of the plantation—an antebellum cotton farmer overseeing the darkies’ efforts—while we labored with come-along and fence-pounder at growing area number three, a grassy slope we’d dubbed “Julie Andrews’s Meadow” because its blues and greens looked like something done in CinemaScope. That night there were six of us for dinner, and as we sat beneath the brownly glowing light-bulbs and suffered the ratchetting shriek of the generator, we found we had some rethinking to do and some hard questions to lay bare.

  “I can appreciate how hard you fellows have been working,” Vogelsang said, “and I think that second growing area you’ve picked is ideal, but some of the fencing you’ve done is … well, I don’t think you’ve got the idea.”

  We were seated on the floor, gathered in a semicircle round the wood stove. Dowst, Vogelsang, Aorta, me, Phil, Gesh. Dowst and Vogelsang were eating reconstituted black mushroom soup and freeze-dried paella out of plastic bowls from Dowst’s backpacking kit. The rest of us—Aorta included—were eating blood-raw steaks, canned beans and French bread, courtesy of Vogelsang. A jug of Cribari red occupied the place of honor in the center of the floor.

  “What do you mean?” Phil said.

  “Well, listen. I don’t think we have to string barbed wire around the growing areas.” I began to protest—we’d nearly killed ourselves over that wire—but Vogelsang anticipated me. “Now hear me out—this’ll save you a lot of work. The way I see it, and Boyd agrees with
me, the only place we need barbed wire is along the border of Lloyd Sapers’s property.”

  “Now he tells us,” Phil said.

  Gesh filled a twelve-ounce Styrofoam cup with wine and glared at Dowst and Vogelsang as if they’d just nailed his mother to a tree. Phil wiped his plate mournfully, while I toyed with a crust of bread, overcome with the sort of plummeting despair you feel when you’re driving coast to coast and suddenly realize, in the dead of night, that you’ve been going in the wrong direction for the past three hours, the oil light is flashing, you’re nearly out of gas, and your dog is not curled comfortably asleep in the back seat as you’d supposed, but was abandoned along the strip of crapped-over grass at the last truck stop. I watched as Dowst sucked beige droplets of soup from his mustache. His shirt was pressed and his hands were as white and unblemished as bars of soap. Aorta chewed steak.

  “It’s the cows the barbed wire will keep out. And the cows are ranging all over Sapers’s place, and ours, too. Right, Boyd?”

  Dowst nodded, dabbing at his mustache with a paper towel. “We saw three of them on the property today. And you know what that means—the cows get lost and then the cowboys come looking for them.”

  “Right,” Vogelsang said, the paella going cold in his lap, “that’s what I mean. We fence the property line—just on Sapers’s side—and then we avoid that sort of, ah, confrontation.”

  “And the growing areas?” I said.

  “Deer fencing.” I watched Vogelsang raise a forkful of rice to his lips, then put it down again. “Clear the area, fence for deer, dig the holes, lay the irrigation pipe and watch the plants grow.”