Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction) Page 4

  We strapped Phil’s skis to the top of the Toyota, along with three or four cardboard boxes of key belongings and priceless mementoes, like the lacquered conch shell he’d brought back from Miami Beach and the history reports he’d been saving since the ninth grade. He lashed his mattress to the boxes, which were in turn lashed to the skis, which were fixed to the Toyota’s roof by means of a frayed bit of clothesline snaked through the windows and granny-knotted at the level of the driver’s forehead. His record collection, acetylene torch, and guitar took up the entire back seat. Gesh was easier. His worldly possessions amounted to two Safeway bags stuffed with odd bits of clothing—chiefly dirty underwear, judging from the top layer—and a box of paperback books.

  When we had it all together it was nearly dark. The mattress-it was a new king-sized sleep-eze deluxe special model and Phil couldn’t bring himself to part with it—sagged over the rear window and mushroomed out from the top of the car like a pulpy carapace. I asked Phil if he was sure the rope would hold. “This?” he said, cinching a limp strand of clothesline to the radio antenna. “Are you kidding? You could take this thing through a hurricane and then drive coast to coast and back again.” He patted the mattress. “No: this baby isn’t going anywhere.”

  As we were crossing the Bay Bridge four and a half hours later, a sudden gust lifted the mattress off the roof and deposited it beneath the wheels of a semi loaded with ball bearings. When it broke loose it took a box of mementoes with it, slamming at the roof of the car like an angry fist and then tearing back with a heart-seizing rumble and a rush of wind. “What was that?” Phil gasped, jerking awake.

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to account for the sudden visibility through the rear window. “I think we lost something.”

  Gesh’s voice was flat and emotionless. He could have been a radio commentator noting a minuscule change in hog futures. “Your mattress,” he said.

  We stopped in the inside lane. Trucks shrieked by with a suck of wind, tires hissed like death, the hair beat crazily at our heads. I could barely catch my breath, each truck tearing the oxygen from my lungs like an explosion. The mattress had already been flattened along three-quarters of its length. Phil made several feints to rush out and nab it, but the traffic was mindless. Sixty miles an hour: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The bridge swayed with the thunder of the big semis. There was a stink of diesel fuel, gull shit, the dead man’s tide. We shrugged our shoulders and eased back into the car.

  For the next nine days we divided our time equally between making preparations for our move to the country (Phil purchased an imitation Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew the size of an auger, Gesh washed his underwear, and I bought six snakebite kits) and deliberating over how we would spend our respective shares of the profits accruing from the summer camp. Gesh was going to reserve the first ten thousand of his $166,666.66 for a blowout at the carnival in Rio, then invest the balance in a thirty-five-foot sloop and cruise the Caribbean with dusky-skinned women, eating lobster and pompano. Phil was going to pay off his debts and maybe open another restaurant—a New Orleans-style fish house with a tile floor, teak booths and big lazy overhead fans. I was worried about taxes. I figured I could buy another neglected Victorian and clandestinely pump cash into it while simultaneously writing off the cost of labor and materials. At any rate, we all agreed that we were sick to death of scrambling for a living and that here was our chance to set ourselves up for life.

  “I’m tired of busting my ass for somebody else,” Phil said, as if he’d been accused of liking it, “and then being so depressed I’ve got to spend every nickel I make on cocktails and tranquilizers.”

  Gesh grunted his assent. My eyes burned with indignation over the wrongs and inequities Phil had suffered—not to mention the wrongs and inequities I’d suffered myself. “I know what you mean,” I said. We were sitting around the living room, idle and impatient, and we were profoundly drunk.

  Society was rotten to the core, I said. It was dog eat dog and every man for himself. I was fed up with academics, real-estate agents and carpenters alike. You gave them everything—heart and soul and sweat—and they gave you nothing in return, not even the satisfaction of a job well done.

  Phil said he knew exactly how I felt.

  Gesh was perched on the windowsill, staring into his glass. After a moment he raised his head. “Society sucks,” he said with real vehemence, and then waved his hand in disgust. “That happy hippie crap.” I knew what he was driving at. The whole hippie ethic—beads, beards, brotherhood, the community of man—it had all been bullshit, a subterfuge to keep us from realizing that there were no jobs, the economy was in trouble and the resources of the world going up in smoke. And we’d bought it, lived it, invented it. For all those years.

  His laugh was bitter. We were older now, he said, and wiser. We knew what counted: money. Money, and nothing else.

  It was late afternoon, the day before we were to dine at Vogelsang’s, work out the last-minute details and then head up to the summer camp. I felt good. I felt ready. As ready as I had ever been for anything in my life. For six months I’d been idle, living off what I’d made from my last remodeling job (the housing market had closed up like a fist) and the pittance they gave me at the community college for teaching a summer course in freshman English, sinking lower into the pit of inactivity, self-denigration and loneliness. Now, sitting there in the glow of anticipation, the moment rich and immediate, Phil and his friend at my side like supporters at a pep rally, I felt purged of all that. Sunlight suffused the room like a dream of kings, Bruce Springsteen was singing about the Promised Land, we were drinking gimlets from a pitcher. I looked out over the rooftops of the city and pictured a fleet of ships lying at anchor, masts stepped and washed in golden light, and I felt like Coronado, like CortéeAs, gazing on the vessels that would take them across the flashing seas and into the vestibule of the treasury of the gods.

  “Saltimbocca alla romana,” Vogelsang announced, backing through the door with a platter in each hand. “With steamed asparagus, and homemade pasta on the side.”

  The table was littered with the remains of the first four courses, with beer bottles and fiascos of wine. After the antipasto, Vogelsang had served a dish of agnolotti, a brodo di pesce and caponata. About halfway through the soupcourse, Dowst joined us, bobbing into the room in blazer and button-down shirt, apologizing for his lateness and showing us a mouthful of gleaming equine teeth. We were eating so hard we barely noticed him.

  When the meat had gone round, I tore a hunk of bread from the fresh-baked loaf and made a joke—in dialect, with Chico Marx flourishes—about the “unafortunate congregation of our-a late associates at-a the Appalachian lodge-a.” Phil laughed. “This is more like the last supper,” he said. No one else cracked a smile. There was a silence, broken only by the moist rhetoric of mastication and the ring of silverware. Finally Phil looked up and said: “Good stuff, Vogelsang. It jumps in your mouth.”

  Vogelsang said he knew the chefs at Vanessi’s and Little Joe’s personally, and that he’d been invited into the kitchen on several occasions. He was eating a minuscule portion himself—no more than a single bite of each dish—and supplementing it with what looked like soggy cornflakes. “You’re not eating?” I said.

  “Oh, God.” Vogelsang looked offended. “This stuff is much too rich for me.” He was eating a mixture of dried flaked fish and pine nuts. The saltimbocca stuck in my throat.

  “Listen, Herb,” Gesh broke in, “why don’t you fill us in on the house and all—you know, what sort of thing we can expect up there.” The silence that fell over the table was absolute: no fork clattered, no lip smacked or tooth champed. Vogelsang’s Christian name was Herbert, but no one called him by his Christian name, not even his mother. He was known as Vogelsang, pure and simple. One of his girlfriends—I can’t recall her name—began calling him “Vogie” after the three of us had sat through a double bill of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. The next time I saw him he wa
s alone.

  Gesh’s words sank into the silence, absorbed like the butter that oozed into the hot bread before him. Gesh knew perfectly well that our benefactor hated to be addressed as Herb or Herbert or any other variant of his given name—I’d specifically warned him against it—and Vogelsang knew that Gesh was trying to provoke him. But if Vogelsang was anything, he was imperturbable. I’d never seen him angry, had never seen him display any emotion whatever, for that matter. To be angry, frightened, happy, moved, was a weakness, a loss of control—and Vogelsang never lost control. “Certainly,” he said, flashing Gesh a smile, “what do you want to know?”

  Gesh was tearing at his veal with knife and fork, talking through the wedge of it stuffed inside his cheek. “Well, shit,” he said, “I mean we’re going to be living out there in the asshole of nowhere for the next nine months while you’re chewing the fat down at Vanessi’s—I want to know what kind of shape the place is in, does it have running water and electricity and all that?”

  “Oh, yes,” Vogelsang said, reaching for his fish flakes, “yes, it has all the essentials.”

  “You’ve got a generator for electricity,” Dowst said. “Runs off an old Briggs and Stratton engine. The water comes from a big redwood holding tank just up the hill from the cabin.”

  “The place is perfectly adequate,” Vogelsang said. “With a little work it could be really cozy.” Aorta was sitting beside him. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled—she actually smiled—before looking down into her wineglass. I watched a piece of veal disappear between her black lips, then turned my attention back to Vogelsang. “It used to be a hunting lodge back in the twenties,” he was saying. “Great view, you’ve got a hilltop overgrown with fir and oak and madrone. There’s even a couple of redwoods.”

  I could see the place. Or rather I could see the cabin we’d rented each summer when I was a kid. It was in Vermont, by the side of a lake. There was the smell of pinesap and wet leaves, the close comforting feel of tree trunks grown so thick your eyes couldn’t penetrate a hundred feet. In the morning, loons cried like lost souls and tanagers whistled outside the window. I remembered sitting around the stone fireplace at night, sunburned and happy, playing hearts with my father. This was going to be all right, I thought. Soothing. Rustic. An adventure. When I tuned back into the conversation, Dowst was talking about worm castings and the need for soil preparation. “The drainage stinks up there,” he was saying, “too heavy a clay content. So what you’ve got to do is create your own environment for each plant—a sand-mulch mixture for drainage and root expression, and the worm castings for nitrogen …”

  Later, over espresso and millefoglie, the lights turned low and Vogelsang’s museum fading into the shadows, we got down to business. The cabin, the supplies, the equipment, the seeds, the eight-dollar per diem Vogelsang would front Gesh, Phil and me each week above and beyond our share of the final profits, the disposal of the mature plants (Vogelsang had a connection who would buy all we could produce, cash up front, no questions asked)—all this was easy. It was Gesh who asked for clarification of the one point that had crouched in all our minds like a stalking beast: “What if we get busted?”

  Vogelsang handled it with perfect sangfroid. “I know nothing about you. I’d bought the land as an investment, and was surprised to hear that anyone was on it, shocked and stunned that illicit activities were taking place there. Under the table, of course, I pay all legal fees.”

  Dowst had come alive at the mention of the verboten word. “First offense,” he said, sipping at his coffee. “No one’s going to jail—a fine and probation, that’s all.” I couldn’t be sure, but I thought 1 saw his hand quaver as he set the cup down.

  Gesh looked angry—he opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it. Aorta was expressionless. Across the table from me Phil eased back in his chair, the effects of the scotch and wine evident in the skew of his bad eye. He was already in his new restaurant, eating oysters at a marble-topped bar. I didn’t know what to think.

  “Don’t worry,” Vogelsang said, “I’ll take care of you.”

  Chapter 4

  Perhaps it was the strange bed, the smell of the sheets or my excited imagination, but my dreams that night were exclusively erotic. Faces leered and tongues lapped, a thicket of pubic hair sprang from the ground, breasts and buttocks sprouted beneath me like vegetables, like fruit, ripe and wet and stippled with dew. Then I was downstairs, in the ballroom. Aorta was pinned to me, naked, her tongue was in my mouth, pasta bubbled on the stove, a legion of stuffed otters, beavers and bobcats stiffened their hackles, she was massaging my abdomen with the strange stiff bristle of her bleached hair. Then she broke away. Cruel and silent as the sphinx, she shifted round the room, playing with herself, taunting me until I lunged for her.

  In one of those odd conjunctions of dream and reality, I was awakened by her voice. “Felix,” she was saying, her voice throaty and raw, as if cracked with sexual exhaustion, “everybody’s up.” I forced my eyes open. She was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a white robe, and she looked smaller than I’d remembered her, shrunken somehow, vulnerable. It was a moment before I realized what it was: she wasn’t wearing any makeup. No black lipstick, no punctured eyes, no skin-prickling claws. “Vogelsang’s making breakfast,” she whispered, hoarse, hoarse, and then turned and shuffled off down the hallway.

  She was right. He was making breakfast: I could smell it. Coffee, Canadian bacon, flapjacks, eggs: the aura of the logging camp suffused the room, penetrated to the core of my being, and in that instant the genitive urge gave way to the alimentary. I jerked myself up and fumbled through my duffel bag for one of the new flannel shirts I’d bought for the summer camp. It was cold. As I buttoned the shirt, bacon in my nostrils, the chill air slapping at my thighs like a cold hand, I looked round the room with satisfaction. A moosehead hovered over the bed, the split-pine walls glistened with varnish, my jacket hung—simplicity itself—from a coat tree in the corner. I slipped into my jeans and workboots, feeling like a candidate for a cigarette ad.

  Downstairs, in the big room we’d vacated in the dark, full of dark fears, there was a flood of sunlight. Everything was gleaming, pricked with light, from the glass of the display cases and the burnished copper of the espresso machine to the wild grinning eye Phil cast at me as I stepped through the doorway and held my hands out to the hissing fire. Phil was already at the table, hunched over a mound of flapjacks and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice; Gesh sat beside him, his plate empty, a Bloody Mary clutched in his hand as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet. I listened to the distant whine of a tea kettle, and to Vivaldi, who was measuring out the irretrievable moments as if to be sure we all had enough.

  Vogelsang startled me. He slammed through the kitchen door, arms laden—coffee pot, pitcher of cream, a platter of eggs in poaching cups flanked by flat red slabs of bacon. He was wound up, so brisk he seemed awkward, each movement an effort to contain the flashes of energy that jerked at his fingers and set his limbs atremble. I thought he was going to lift off the floor and flap round the room like a cockatiel sprung from its cage, but he managed instead to set the platter down and boom a greeting at me. “Felix!” he shouted. “It’s about time.” He was wearing a running suit, chevrons at the shoulders, stripes down the seams of the legs. Too loudly, and far too cheerfully, he informed me that he’d already run seven miles and loaded the back of the pickup with our equipment.

  I sat down and began to consume eggs. Vogelsang crouched at the head of the table, lecturing in spasms, alternately gulping fistfuls of garlic pills and ginseng and dosing himself with breath neutralizer. “Picks, shovels, a wheelbarrow,” he said, interrupting himself to swallow a desiccated-liver tablet. “A couple rolls of barbed wire and a come-along, and two little Kawasakis I’ve just finished overhauling. It’s all in the truck. Plus some odds and ends: an axe, a set of socket wrenches, claw hammer, that sort of thing. Oh: and the two-by-fours and whatnot for the greenhous
e. Boyd will be up there at the end of the week, and he’s going to bring up the worm castings and seeds and all the rest in his van.”

  Gesh was wearing a torn flannel shirt that featured cowboys with lariats, his hair was in aboriginal disarray and his eyes looked as if they’d been freshly transplanted. He mixed himself another Bloody Mary, threw back two Quaaludes and gave us a sick grin.

  “You’ll need the bikes for patrolling the place once you get the crop in—three hundred ninety acres is no putting green, you know—and for handling the irrigation system during the dry months. But the first thing you’ve got to do—and this is vitally important—is to get that fencing up.” Vogelsang paused to shake the vial of breath spray irritably, set it down on the table and fumble in his pocket for another. Phil was reading the sports page. Gesh looked as if he were about to fall into his drink.

  Half an hour later we were milling around Vogelsang’s driveway, preparatory to setting off on the four-hour drive to Mendocino County and the wild venue we would tame like the pioneers and prospectors we were. Gravel crunched under our feet. Birds piped and throbbled. Sunlight fell through the trees with a cheering insistence and the air was like milk. Vogelsang was fussing around the vehicles, cinching ropes and rearranging cartons of supplies, but I wasn’t paying him any attention. I was feeling the pulse of things, suddenly aware of that richness of color and texture you take for granted until you see it represented in oils or illuminating the big screen in a darkened theater. The smell of eucalyptus was as sharp as recollection.

  Then Vogelsang was pumping my hand. Aorta stood beside him, restored to impermeability behind her layers of makeup and a black vinyl jacket. “Good luck,” Vogelsang said, reasserting his promise to look in on us in a week or so. Phil fired up the vehicle our benefactor had provided for us—an ancient, fender-punched Datsun pickup—and I climbed into the Toyota beside Gesh. “Where’s the ticker tape?” 1 called, grinning, as I turned over the engine and wheeled up the drive, feeling heroic, poised on the verge of greatness, ready for anything. The gears clattered, I waved my arm off, Phil fell in behind me and Gesh began to snore.