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

  “I don’t know a thing about growing marijuana,” I said finally. Vogelsang was ready for this. “You don’t have to,” he said, lifting himself from the chair arm, “—that’s Boyd’s department.”

  “But two thousand plants … can one person handle that sort of thing?”

  “No way,” Dowst said, rustling his rain slicker.

  “We figure you’ll need two full-time people to help out. Who they are and how you pay them is up to you. You could hire them on a straight salary, or split your five hundred into shares. But whatever, they’ve got to be willing to give up the next nine months of their lives, and above all they’ve got to be”—here he paused to come up with the right word—“discreet.”

  Rain hit the roof like pennies from heaven, the icy voice on the radio was chanting Money, give me money,/Money, give me money.© We were all standing, for some reason. Dowst and Vogelsang were grinning, the girl’s face had softened with what I took to be a sort of truculent amicability.

  “How about your friend up in Tahoe,” Vogelsang said, as if he’d had a sudden inspiration (I realized at that instant he’d been playing me all along, like a street-corner salesman, a carnival barker making his pitch). “What’s his name …” (he knew it as well as I) “Cherniske?”

  “Phil,” I said, half to myself. “Yeah, Phil,” as if I’d stumbled across the solution to a baffling puzzle.

  Vogelsang took hold of my hand and pumped it in a congratulatory way, Dowst showing all his long gleaming teeth now, the girl fighting to keep the corners of her mouth from curling into a smile. I felt as if I’d just come back from sailing around the world or whipping the defending Wimbledon champ. I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no, but already Vogelsang was lifting his half-empty Moosehead bottle and calling for a toast.

  He had an arm round my shoulder, zombies disintegrated on the TV screen as heroes lobbed grenades at them, the cold voice chanted money in my ear, the smell of musk, of conception, of semen and the dark essence of the earth fired my nostrils, and then he flung up his hand, bottle clenched tight, like an evangelist called to witness: “To the summer camp!”

  Chapter 2

  There was nothing in my early upbringing to indicate a life of crime. I wasn’t beaten, orphaned or abandoned, I didn’t hang out on street corners with a cigarette in my mouth and a stiletto in my pocket, I wasn’t mentally disfigured from years in a reformatory or morally and physically sapped as a result of shooting smack on pigeon-shit-encrusted stoops in the ghetto. No: I was a child of the middle class, nurtured on Tiger’s Milk and TV dinners and Aureomycin until I towered over my parents like some big-footed freak of another species, like a cuckoo raised by sparrows. I knew algebra, appreciated Verdi, ate veal marsala, sushi and escargots, and selected a good bottle of wine. My record, if not spotless, was tainted only by the most venial infractions. There had been the usual traffic violations, an unfortunate incident on the steps of the Justice Department during one of the Washington marches, and a fine for carrying an open container on the streets of Lake George. But that was about it. Certainly, like any other solid citizen with inalienable rights, I broke laws regularly—purchasing and consuming controlled substances, driving at a steady sixty-five on freeways, fornicating in water beds and hot tubs, micturating in public, knowingly and willingly being in the presence of persons who, etc., etc. On the other hand, I didn’t litter, extort, burgle, batter, assault, rape or murder. At thirty-one, endowed with the cautiousness and conservatism of maturity, I could arguably consider myself, if not a pillar, then at least a flying buttress of bourgeois society.

  Still, two hours after Vogelsang had left, and despite a weariness that verged on narcolepsy and a steady blinding Niagara of a rainstorm, I was on my way to Lake Tahoe to take my first irretrievable steps into the lower depths.

  At four a.m. I pulled into a truckstop and sat hunched over the counter on a cracked vinyl stool, spooned up grease and eggs, listened to moronic country-inflected yodeling from the jukebox, and drank eight cups of coffee that tasted of death and metal. The rain had stopped, and I watched myself in the dark, water-flecked window for a moment, my face lit by neon and the flashing lights of semis, and saw that my eyes glared and cheeks bristled with the look of criminality. Or tiredness. Then I left some money on the counter, stumbled out to my rust-spotted Toyota, and drove on up the hill to where dawn was flaring over South Tahoe.

  I missed the turnoff for Cherniske’s place, everything uniform at this altitude, snow on the ground like a fungus, trees as alike as a forest of Dixon pencils. Without thinking, I swerved to cut a U-turn and was nearly annihilated by a California highway patrolman doing about ninety on urgent business. The thing that saved my life—and the patrolman’s—was the supersiren with which the CHP car was equipped, the sort of deadly, heart-seizing klaxon fire trucks use when approaching intersections. I was halfway through my illegal U-turn, horizontal to the flow of traffic and already obstructing an entire lane, oblivious to sirens, lights, the possibility of runaway logging trucks, when the klaxon slapped me like an angry hand. My foot went to the floor, tires squealed, brake drums clapped like cymbals, and the Toyota lurched to a halt as the CHP cruiser careened past the front bumper, inches to spare. As he passed, the patrolman gave me a quick sharp look of murderous intensity—a look that said, I would shoot you here, now, no questions asked, as automatically as I would shoot a rattlesnake or a junkyard rat, but for this appalling emergency that requires my dedication, bravery and expertise—and then he was gone, a pair of taillights skidding round a corner in the distance.

  Mortified, I pulled the car round just in time to avoid the shrieking ambulance for which the cruiser had been running interference, humbly shifted gears, signaled, and swung onto the wet glistening blacktop road that snaked through the trees to Cherniske’s place. Almost instantly there was a thump, the wheel was jerked from my hand, and the car veered wildly for the shoulder and a clutch of nasty russet-barked pines. I’d been driving since I was sixteen and, groggy though I was, rose to the occasion, snatching the wheel back and regaining control without missing a beat. Calmly, almost clinically, I noted the cause of my minor emergency: there was a groove in the road. A deep insistent gash that seamed the right-hand lane like a furrow, as if some absentminded sodbuster had neglected to lift the plow blade while rumbling home on his tractor. I would have thought nothing more of it but for the fact that the groove seemed to be going in the same direction I was, turn for turn. I followed it down Alpine Way to the end, left on Lederhosen Lane, left again on Chalet Drive, and then, amazingly, into Phil’s driveway and right on up to the bumper of his sagging ’62 Cadillac.

  Phil’s house—a two-story chalet/cabin/condo/duplex—was silent, the windows dark. It was seven a.m., and the early light had been absorbed in a low ceiling of ropy cloud the color of charcoal. I swung out of the car and examined Phil’s Cadillac: it was pitched forward like a crippled stegosaur, tail fins in the air, and the right front fender and a portion of the hood had been crumpled like tinfoil. Looking closer, I saw that not only was the tire gone on that side, but the brake drum and wheel as well. The car was resting on a sheared splinter of axle, from the apex of which the groove raveled out up the driveway, down the blacktop road, and out to the highway. The engine was still warm.

  No one responded to my knock. This was no surprise: I hadn’t really expected a formal reception. At this hour, Phil and his assorted roommates would be entering the first leaden phase of deep sleep, having closed the bars in California and roamed the casinos of Stateline, Nevada, until dawn. The door was unlatched. I stepped in, sleeping bag under my arm, thinking to curl up on the couch, wake when they did, and put my proposition to Phil over breakfast. It was colder inside than out, and the place had a familiar subterranean smell to it—a smell of underwear and socks worn too long, of stale beer, primitive cooking and a species of mold that thrives under adverse conditions. The shades were drawn, but there was light enough to distinguish generic shapes: TV, arm
chair, couch, bicycle, lamp, log. I groped my way to the couch, unfurled the sleeping bag and sat down.

  This was a mistake. As my buttocks made contact with flesh and bone rather than Herculon and Styrofoam and I began to intuit that the couch was already occupied, a quick lithe form jerked up to shove at my chest, rake my face and gasp a few emphatic obscenities. “Nooooooooo,” the voice—it was feminine—half rasped, half shrieked, “I’ve had enough. Now get off!" I found myself on the floor, muttering apologies. Then the light exploded in the room as if it had come on with a blast of noise, and I was staring up at a tableau vivant: the girl’s white naked arm poised at the lamp switch, her furious squinting eyes, high breasts, the lavender comforter slipped to her waist. “Who the hell are you?” she hissed.

  “Felix,” I whispered, somehow feeling as if I were covering up the truth, “Phil’s friend.”

  She glared at me as if she hadn’t heard. Her hair was a cracked fluff of peroxide blond, her eyes were green as glass marbles, she had no eyebrows. I watched her nipples harden in the cold. “I’m looking for Phil,” I said.

  “Who?” The tone was barely under control, the upward swing of the interrogative a scarcely suppressed snarl. “Listen, mister”—drawing the comforter up under her armpits—“you better get your ass out of here or, or I’ll—“ She never finished the phrase, gesturing vaguely and then fumbling for a cigarette on the coffee table.

  This is what an inept rapist must feel like, I thought. Or a cat burglar who catches the Mother Superior with her habit down. Despite myself, I found I had an erection. “Phil,” I repeated. “Phil Cherniske? The guy that rents this place?”

  Suddenly the rage went out of her face. She looked up at me over her cigarette as she lit it, shook out the match and took a deep drag. Eyebrowless, she looked like Humpty-Dumpty or the Man in the Moon, too much pale unbroken space between eyes and hair. I watched her exhale a blue cloud of smoke. “Oh, Phil,” she said finally, wearily, as if she’d just experienced a revelation that hadn’t seemed worth the effort. “He’s in jail.”

  Phil and I had been close all our lives. Our parents had been friends before we were born, we’d attended the same elementary and secondary schools, had quit separate colleges in the same year. Phil went west, I stayed in New York. I got married, went back to school, dropped out, found a job selling life insurance to pensioners with trembling hands and hated myself for it. Phil made a brief splash in L.A. (Pasadena, actually) as Phil Yonkers, sculpteur primitif. He roamed junkyards with the avidity and determination of a housewife at a Macy’s white sale, collecting fascinating slabs of rusted iron, discarded airplane wings, scalloped fenders, anvils, stoves, washing machines, useless but intrinsically edifying cogs, springs and engine parts from obsolete heavy machinery. These he would weld together in random configurations, hose down to encourage oxidation, and offer for sale.

  I remember a brochure he once sent me in advertisement of his first (and last) show. The cover featured a poorly reproduced photo of the artist (the sagging pompadour, pointed nose, emaciated frame and wandering eye) grinning in the lee of a gargantuan iron monster that dripped oil like saliva and seemed to be composed around the gap-toothed shovel of an earthmover and a set of pistons frozen at descending intervals. The text indicated that the piece was titled Madonna and Child, and compared the artist to Herms, Smith and Keinholz. Unfortunately, the show had to be canceled the afternoon it opened, owing to irremediable structural damage to the building that housed the gallery. The immense, crushing weight of Phil’s pieces, combined with the exuberance of his friends and acquaintances—who turned the sedate, champagne-sipping gathering into a foot-stomping celebration of rock and roll and the sculptor’s muse—fractured several floor joists and collapsed a section of the foundation. Phil did manage to sell one piece—three table saws welded together beneath a corona of conjoined lug wrenches molded in the shape of a butterfly’s wings—to a retired tool-and-die maker from Boyle Heights. Then he went into the restaurant business.

  The restaurant business, as far as I can see, harbors a greater assortment of misfits, bon vivants, congenital crazies and food, drug, and alcohol abusers than any other méeAtier, with the possible exception of the medical. Phil, disappointed in his effort to combine artistic expression and pecuniary reward, was only too willing to give himself up to the pharmaceutical oblivion of the world of waiters and plongeurs. He stood before a blazing grill at a steak house in Boulder, washed dishes at a Himalayan restaurant in Montpelier, tended bar in Maui, Park City and Aspen, bisected oysters on Bourbon Street. For a time, like most restaurant people, he attained restaurant nirvana, opening his own place. He borrowed money from his parents, his friends, relatives whose existence he’d forgotten, went partners with a savvy Greek in his mid-fifties, opened an impeccable haute-cuisine eatery in the suburbs of Sacramento, and went broke in nine months. Bad location, he said, but he later confided to me that the savvy Greek had been skimming money off the top. When I came to town that early morning with the proposition Vogelsang had made me, Phil was employed as a dishwasher at the Tahoe Teriyaki and, as I learned from the girl on the couch, temporarily incarcerated.

  I blinked at her two or three times. My eyes felt as if they were bleeding. I staggered to my feet, dragging the sleeping bag like the corpse of a dead enemy, fumbled my way out the door, across the blackened and pissed-over snow, and back into the Toyota. Ten minutes later I pulled into the courthouse lot where the Eldorado County Sheriff’s Department maintained its drunk tank and holding facility.

  If the stereotypical desk sergeant is loose of jowl, corpulent, balding and noncommunicative, the man I encountered at the Sheriff’s Department didn’t break any new ground. A cardboard container of coffee steamed on the counter before him, his eyes were as puffed as a prizefighter’s, and his loose jowls were reddened with a thousand tiny nicks and abrasions that gave evidence of a recent and clumsy shave with one of the new, ultramodern, reclining-head skin-whittlers reinvented by Gillette, Bic and the rest each month. I wear a beard myself.

  “Excuse me, officer,” I said. “I’d like to put up bail for someone you might be holding here.” I felt like Raskolnikov in Myshkin’s office, born guilty, guilty in perpetuity, guilty of everything from not honoring and obeying my parents to adolescent masturbation and stealing cigars to the larger and more heinous crimes of adulthood. I wanted to blurt it all out, confess in spate, be shriven and forgiven. Uniforms did that to me.

  The desk sergeant said nothing.

  I repeated myself, with a slight variation, and began to think wildly of all the possible permutations of this simple communication I might have to sift through until I hit the right one—the combination that would set clicking the tumblers of the policeman’s speech centers—when I hit on revealing the name of the incarceree after whom I was inquiring. “Cherniske,” I said. “Philip T.”

  Still nothing. The man was immovable, emotionless, a jade Buddha serenely contemplating some quintessential episode of a TV police show, perhaps one in which a mild-mannered desk sergeant is moved to heroics by the sick and sad state of society, leaping out from behind his deceptive mask of lethargy to pound drunks, pleaders, crooks and loophole-manipulating lawyers back into the dirt where they belonged. I tried again, this time making it a question: “Phil Cherniske? Brought in this morning? Public intoxication?”

  The thick neck swiveled like a lazy susan, the blue beads of the eyes hesitated on me with a look of hatred or impassivity—I couldn’t tell which—and continued past me to focus on an object over my left shoulder. The officer’s next motion was almost magical, so abrupt and yet so conservative of energy: his chins compressed briefly and then relaxed. I looked over my shoulder to a wooden bench flanked by a battered water cooler and a forlorn flag. “You want me to wait over there?” I said, my voice unnaturally loud, as if in compensation for his rigorous silence.

  I watched his eyes for the answer, in the way one watches the eyes of a stroke victim for life. They sque
ezed shut, slowly, tenderly, then flashed open again—he could have been a dragon disturbed in its sleep—before drifting down to contemplate the steam rising from the cup. I turned, obsequiously dodging leather-booted, black-jacketed, hip-slung patrolmen, who stomped and jangled across the scuffed linoleum floor, and started for the bench. Halfway there, pausing to maneuver around a fleshy colossus who stood yawning and scratching before the water cooler, I was suddenly arrested by a summons at my back, a croak really, like some barely breathed disclosure of the oracle. “Sixty-five dollars,” the voice whispered.

  I gave him three twenties and a five. As the crisp folded bills passed between us, I felt we’d attained some sort of brotherhood, a moment of truth and accord, and I took advantage of it to ask the sergeant if he could possibly tell me when the prisoner might be released. His eyes were glass. Five fat fingers lay on the bills like dead things. When I saw that no answer was forthcoming, I wheeled round, irritated, and blundered into an officer dressed in the uniform of the California Highway Patrol, replete with mirror shades, Wehrmacht boots and outsized gunbelt.

  “Oh—excuse me,” I gasped, regaining my balance and letting the final vowel trail off in a little bleat of urbane laughter meant not only to implicate him in a shared responsibility for our collision and the foibles of the human condition in general, but to assure him that it had been purely accidental and that, just as he would think no more of it, neither would I. I was grinning like an idiot. He was not grinning. The shades in fact seemed to draw his eyes together into a single horrific Cyclopean mask that rendered the rest of his face expressionless. He stood there a second, rocking back and forth on his heels, then tore off the sunglasses. “You,” he snarled.