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

  “Me?” The smile had gone sick on my face. I recognized him in that instant, the guilt I’d felt on entering the station house infesting me like a cancer, my mind racing through the minuscule store of legal knowledge I’d accumulated under duress in the past, thinking moving violation, his word against mine, judicium parium aut leges terrae.

  All for naught. He threw me against the wall in an explosion of shoulders and arms and began to shout in my face. “What in Christ’s name do you want here?” he spat, his voice breaking on the expletive. The room had gone silent. All the others—big, beefy local cops—looked up from their coffee and clipboards and took an involuntary step or two toward us, like a defensive backfield converging on the ball carrier.

  I began to offer an explanation when my antagonist bellowed for me to shut up. His hands pressed my elbows to the wall. He was breathing hard, his upper lip was wet and his eyes shone with the fierce fanatical glow of righteousness one recognized in the eyes of Muslim zealots. A black plastic plate over his shirt pocket identified him as Officer Jerpbak.

  There in the police station, up against the wall, physical harm and worse shouting me in the face, I found a moment to indulge myself in the luxury of philosophy, to acknowledge my debt to empiricism, causality and John Locke. A mere eight hours ago I’d been padding round the apartment in my bathrobe, listening to the rain and Stravinsky preparatory to turning in. All was right with the world. And then the Grail, in the form of half a million dollars, sashayed through the room and I ducked out into the rain, inserted the key in the ignition of my Toyota, welcomed the answering shriek of the enervated engine, and drove here, to Tahoe, where I had managed to make an enemy of the most desperate and lawless sort—a cop—simply because I’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suddenly I felt indescribably weary. “Get your fucking hands off me,” I said.

  Officer Jerpbak responded by spinning me around like an Indian club and slamming me back into the wall in the classic shakedown position. “Spread ’em,” he snarled, patting me down with all the finesse of a middleweight working out with the body bag. He gave elaborate consideration to the genital area, all the while breathing obscenities over my shoulder. “You fuck,” he whispered, his voice trembling at the breaking point. “You stupid-ass dildo motherfucker: you nearly killed me out there, you know that? Huh? Huh?” His breathing was furious, incendiary: I could hear the hardened snot rattling in his nostrils. All I wanted at that moment was to swell to Laestrygonian proportions and murder him, pound the other beefeaters to hamburger, set fire to the station house and go home to bed. Instead, I listened to the harsh jangle of handcuffs and relaxed under his grip.

  “You know who was in that ambulance?” he demanded, leaning into me with one broad hand while he fumbled with the other for the cuffs. “Huh? Huh?” It was a quiz, that’s what it was. Twenty questions. Hit the jackpot and win two free tickets to the Martial Arts Exposition. “Merv Griffin, that’s who, shit-head. Merv Griffin.” There was reverence in his voice—he could have been naming the Pope’s mother or the winner of the Miss America Pageant—reverence, and outrage. “The man took twenty-two stitches in his thumb—he could of bled to death.” Suddenly he was shouting again. “You hear me? Huh? Huh?”

  My hands were torn from the wall and forced behind me, there was the cold bite of the cuffs, the furious breathing, and then, just when things had begun to look grim, the soft restrained tones of a second voice, deus ex machina: “John, John, take it easy.” I looked over my shoulder. Officer Raab had joined us. He had a head the size of a beachball, crimson face, white hair. His voice was as soothing and softly modulated as a shrink’s. “John,” he repeated, “the man hasn’t done anything. He’s here to bail somebody out is all.”

  Jerpbak wheeled round on him. “I don’t give a shit.” There was a whining edge to his voice, the young hothead reluctantly deferring to a higher authority, and I realized in that instant that Jerpbak was no older than I. It was a jolt. I could have submitted to a middle-aged cop—an Officer Raab or the mute desk sergeant—could have rationalized the father figure’s need to assert himself and all that, but with a coeval like Jerpbak the experience was humiliating, deeply shameful. A whole series of childhood episodes suddenly flooded my mind. I saw every physical confrontation in a flash, tallied up the wins and losses, counted the times I’d backed down, conjured the faces of the class bullies and extortionists as if they were snapshots in a riffled deck. No older than I. I jerked my neck at Officer Raab. “You don’t get these cuffs off in two seconds, I’ll sue everybody in this place for false arrest, and, and”—I was so wrought up I nearly sobbed the word—“brutality.”

  Officer Raab had a soft puffy hand on Officer Jerpbak’s upper arm. They’d moved off a pace, and the older man was whispering in the younger’s ear like a lover. I watched Jerpbak: he looked like a cobra having his hood stroked. When I opened my mouth, Raab glanced at me as if I were a bit of offal—talking offal, something of a curiosity perhaps, but for all that worth no more than a cursory glance—and then moved off across the room and down a pitted corridor, Jerpbak in tow.

  I was left standing in the middle of the room, hands manacled behind my back. Every cop in the place was staring at me. After a moment’s hesitation, a wizened little deputy crossed the room, released the cuffs and told me in a quiet voice to wait on the bench. I was exhausted, confused, furious. I eased down on the bench, breathing in gasps, adrenaline bubbling in my veins like grease in a deep fryer. Two minutes later I was snoring.

  I was awakened by a pressure on my arm and a voice repeating my name. It was Phil. He looked as if he’d just emerged from the third tier of an opium den, his eyes drooping, shirt torn, hair wedged to one side of his head, and he was smiling the fragile smile of a man with a terminal headache. “Shit!” he said, breaking into a grin, and then he repeated himself six or seven times, alternating the exclamation and my name like a cheerleader trying to rouse a stand of lethargic fans. I blinked twice. There were pins and needles in my feet. All the fearsome G-forces of the spinning planet tugged at me as I rose wearily to exchange the backslapping hug we’d used in greeting ever since we saw Beau Geste together at the age of fourteen. “Kid,” I said. Then we stood there looking at each other for a moment, both of us grinning now, until Phil said he didn’t know what I was doing in Tahoe but that I couldn’t have come at a better time and did I happen to have another sixty-five dollars on me.

  I did. I’d stuffed some bills in my wallet as I left San Francisco—a hundred and sixty dollars or so. Sixty-five and sixty-five was one-thirty, I was thinking as I reached for my wallet. That left me nothing to eat on and an expired Shell card for gas. I asked him what he needed it for.

  Phil was rubbing his temples. He looked up at me out of bloodshot eyes and let the air whistle through his teeth. “For Gesh.”

  “Who?”

  “Gesh. He’s the new roommate. They’ve still got him back there,” indicating the rear of the building, “and I’d have to wait till the bank opens before I could bail him out. Crazy Eddie we’re going to have to take up a collection for.”

  Crazy Eddie was the third roommate. He’d been behind the wheel when the road had insidiously narrowed and the triangular sign with the insistent arrow had sprung up in front of the bumper. Crazy Eddie flattened the sign and then took out three or four of the steel posts behind it before the right front wheel of Phil’s Cadillac sheared off and the car spun to a halt. All three of them had been drinking and eating Quaaludes, and their judgment was gone. They pulled themselves out of the car to assess the damage and saw that they had annihilated the guardrail of a narrow bridge somewhere off the main road. Black trees stared down at them. Water hummed under the bridge. Crazy Eddie expressed his regrets to Phil and offered his condolences with regard to the condition of the car. Phil asked him if he knew how to get home. Eddie applied in the affirmative, and they stumbled back into the car. Then he revved the engine and lurched out into the far lane, trailing sparks. The
police followed the furrow to Phil’s house, arrested Phil in the act of urinating against a tree, dragged the comatose Gesh from the back seat, and proceeded into the house, where they peeled Crazy Eddie from the girl on the couch and booked him for DWI and leaving the scene of an accident. Bail was fifteen hundred dollars.

  “I see what you mean,” I said, referring to Eddie’s dilemma, counted out the sixty-five dollars and watched Phil re-count it for the mute desk sergeant. Ten minutes later Gesh staggered down the pitted hallway, an officer at his side. He was wearing a watch cap, a reindeer sweater and a drooping khaki overcoat the Salvation Army might have rejected.

  A roomful of cops, stenographers, fingerprint filers, minor functionaries and shackled suspects watched Phil introduce us. I saw cheekbones cut like slashes, unfocused eyes, a stubble of beard. The overcoat concealed a big man, two hundred pounds or more. There were nicotine stains on his teeth and one of his eyebrows was divided by a white scar. I nodded, made a stab at a smile. Gesh was unsteady. He fell back on one heel, covered himself by grabbing my hand in a bleary soul shake, and murmured, “Aces, man.”

  Outside, it was snowing. Dry white pellets sifting down with a hiss. We tramped silently across the white expanse of the parking lot, the wind in our faces, a line of smeared footprints snaking out behind us and climbing the steps of the stationhouse in mute incrimination. Gesh jerked open the door of the Toyota and pitched headlong into the back seat. He was asleep by the time I cleared the snow from the windshield and thumped in beside Phil. My stomach was sour, my head ached. I wondered what in God’s name I was doing in a snowstorm in Lake Tahoe at eight-thirty in the morning.

  I glanced at Phil. He was grinning at me, his wandering eye so far out of alignment it could have been orbiting the socket. Then he began to laugh, a braying gasping high-pitched shriek that choked on each breath only to come back all the stronger on the next. I couldn’t help myself. Delirium, hunger, sleep-deprivation: whatever triggered it, suddenly I was laughing along with him. Roaring. Beating the steering wheel, throwing my head back, struggling for control and then looking at Phil and collapsing all over again. This was hilarious—the snow, the parked car, the police—all of it. “Phil,” I gasped, my voice cracking with the absurdity of what I was about to say, “Phil, listen, how would you like”—I broke off, laughter nagging like a cough, the sheer silliness of it—“how would you like to make a quarter of a million dollars?”

  Chapter 3

  She stood at the door, looking through us, incongruous in an apron that featured a pair of chipmunks brandishing oversized carving knives and the slogan Why dontcba come up and see us sometime? Woodwork gleamed behind her, dried flowers threw shadows like teeth against the wall. I smiled. No response. We’d heard the music from the road the instant we stepped out of the car. Now, in the open doorway, it was an assault, loud enough to ionize gases, impair hearing, score the lining of the brain. There was an aggressive smell of cookery, too—garlic sizzling in olive oil—that constricted my throat and poked like a finger at my gut. It was drizzling. Cold. Aorta looked down at her feet, then up at my face and away again. “Hello,” she said.

  Phil and Gesh shuffled behind me like a pair of thugs. Somehow, somewhere, Phil had dug up a khaki overcoat identical to Gesh’s—double-breasted, pleated, belted, and encrusted with stainless-steel loops and couplings that flashed like badges—and they were both wearing fishing hats with the brims pulled low. Aorta stepped back, Gesh paused to grind out his cigarette in the upturned palm of a headless mannequin outside the door, and then we were in.

  The door closed with a heavy, airtight thump, like the door of a bank vault, and we found ourselves in a narrow hallway crowded with hunting trophies. Teeth, horns, nostrils. More dead flowers. Dumb-staring eyes. Javelinas drew back their lips to expose tusks the color of tobacco, mule deer thrust out their antlers, a wizened black creature I didn’t recognize seemed to be devouring itself in a frozen tumult of tooth and claw. “Well,” I said pointlessly. The music raged, the smell of food tore at our stomachs. I shouted out introductions, my companions ducked their heads distractedly, Aorta stifled a smile—was she naturally fractious or merely shy?—and then turned to lead us down a series of hallways and a flight of stairs to the lower level of the lodge she shared with Vogelsang.

  She left us in what had once been the ballroom—big floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of treetops and ocean—and disappeared through a swinging door at the far end of the room. I caught a glimpse of Vogelsang, in chef’s hat and apron, standing over a stove as the door swung back on itself. Phil dropped into the sofa as if he’d been shot, and Gesh strode directly to the amplifier and cut the volume. The silence was thunderous. One minute a desperate ragged voice had been raging in my ears over the amplifed thump of tribal drums, and in the next I could detect the smallest sounds: a spoon rotated in a pot, the hiss of a gas burner. As if in compensation, the cooking smells seemed to intensify, tempering the atmosphere like a mother’s touch.

  The room was huge, vaulted like a cathedral, and literally encrusted with the objects of Vogelsang’s collecting mania, as cluttered and baroque as a hall in the Museum of Natural History. Which is not to say that each article didn’t have its precise place or that a single piece was displayed to disadvantage. The Tahitian gill nets were suspended from the ceiling, softening the effect of the open beams, a gleaming espresso machine climbed the wall like an instrument of torture, knives and guns were arranged symmetrically on hooks over the fireplace, the oil paintings—richly framed and fastidiously hung—occupied a nook over a party of mannequins and stuffed badgers in coats and T-shirts grouped round a table in the corner. There was a long dining table in one section of the room, a TV and stereo cubicle in another, a museum display case containing pottery shards and fossilized human bones just to the left of the kitchen door. You could spend a week poking through it all and still have another eight rooms to tour.

  “Hey,” Gesh was saying, “did you see this?” Phil got up to join him and whistle in appreciation; I laughed. He was standing over one of Vogelsang’s taxidermic triumphs, a pair of bobcats doing the lindy, claws entwined, knees bent, heads thrown back in Dionysian ecstasy. Beside them, a cakewalking salmon leaped into a lampshade, the soft-white bulb protruding from its mouth like an egg in a comedy routine.

  Gesh was trying his index finger against the incisor of one of the bobcats when the kitchen door heaved open and Vogelsang burst into the room, grinning wide. “Welcome, welcome,” he said, pumping my hand, clapping Phil on the back, and hesitating ever so slightly before reaching for Gesh’s hand. Vogelsang had discarded the white hat and apron, and was wearing a T-shirt that announced: I’M OK, YOU’RE OK. There was a moment of confusion over the handshake—Vogelsang coming straight on for the businessman’s handclasp, Gesh cocking his wrist for the soul shake—and then Vogelsang was asking us what we’d like, cocktail, beer, pot, sherry, mulled cider, a nice dry not-too-tart zinfandel he’d come across at a little vineyard in Sonoma County?

  Gesh asked him what kind of beer he had and Vogelsang listed six or seven imported brands. “Yeah, that sounds good,” Gesh said, sinking into the sofa and raising a work boot to the coffee table, “beer.”

  Vogelsang was a little edgy—I could tell by his diction, which got ever more precise, sprinkled with “I shall”s and “pardon me”s, as if he were trying out for the role of Prince Charles in a made-for-TV movie of the future monarch’s lovelife. He was out of the room and back in an instant with our drinks—Phil and I had asked for scotch—and a tray of antipasto. “We’re having Italian tonight,” he said. “I hope you fellows don’t mind. I make my own pasta, and I’ve been simmering the sauce since I turned out this morning.”

  I couldn’t help grinning: he was amazing. Entrepreneur, culturato, expert mechanic, carpenter and electrician, collector non-pareil—and gourmet chef to boot. We murmured our assent, the congenial guests. “Sounds great,” Phil said.

  There was a silence. Vogelsang was
twisting a wineglass in his hands. Perched on the arm of the sofa, he looked like a bird of prey, his nose hooked like an accipiter’s, the blond hair cropped close as feathers. Phil and Gesh were sunk into the couch like cephalopods washed up on the beach. Vogelsang’s tone was different now, terser, more businesslike. “So you fellows know all the details, correct?” He looked at me. I nodded.

  Gesh stirred and pushed himself up with a grunt, as if it required a herculean effort, took a long swallow of beer, and then looked Vogelsang in the eye. “No,” he said, something obstinate and combative creeping into his voice, “why don’t you tell us about it?”

  For the past week and a half Phil had been occupying the spare bedroom at Fair Oaks, and Gesh had been sleeping on the couch in the living room. It had taken them a single day to wrap up their affairs in Tahoe (Phil phoned the Tahoe Teriyaki, shouted “I quit” at the bewildered busboy who picked up the phone and then hung up, having forgotten to identify himself; Gesh simply failed to show up for his bartending job). The Cadillac was chalked up as a loss, the girl on the couch—her name was Nelda—was given responsibility for the chalet/cabin/condo/duplex, the landlord was berated and abused via telephone, and close friends were lied to (the official story was that Phil and Gesh were moving to San Francisco to work with me in the remodeling trade). It was rumored that Crazy Eddie’s mother was wiring bail money, so Phil felt he could rest easy on that score, and he closed out his bank account with a check for $32.14. “Well,” he said with a grin after he’d hung up on the landlord, “the only thing now is to pack up all of this shit,” gesturing at the mounds of arcane artifacts that littered the floor like the leavings of an aboriginal tribe, “and hit the road.”