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

  It was relevant that first night at the summer camp.

  We found ourselves in the purlieus of nowhere, cold, hungry, exhausted and wet, our hair, skin and clothing layered with mud, which is of course simply protean dirt. Disappointment choked us. Weltschmerz glinted in our eyes. Our hands were black as potatoes dug from the ground, black as the hands of the mechanic I’d known in New York when I was selling insurance. He’d held up his hands to me one afternoon as I came in to reclaim my car. “See these hands?” he said. I looked. The skin was uniformly black, as if it had been dyed or tattooed, the nails were gone, black callus gave way to gray. “You think you got it bad,” he said. “At least you don’t have to get your hands dirty.” It was a revelation: ineradicable dirt, stigmatic dirt, dirt as an unbridgeable social barrier. I’d tried to picture him at the Waldorf or Gracie Mansion, making polite conversation and passing the croissants with hands that looked as if they’d been exhuming corpses. Now, and for the next nine months, we’d know how he felt.

  A gust of wind rattled the windows. I shivered. We needed heat, we needed hot water, we needed soap. Phil pried some rusted two-penny nails from a sagging outbuilding and nailed the door shut, while Gesh kindled the fire with his lighter and then hunted up a Coleman lantern. I didn’t know what to do. Voodoo drums were pounding in my ears, a fist beat at my stomach, the witchery of the calendar as unsettling as an effigy transfixed with pins. I couldn’t help it: I was shaken.

  “Come on, man,” Gesh said, wadding up newspapers and feeding them into the stove, “snap out of it. You know as well as I do the whole thing is just that shithead Vogelsang’s idea of a joke—big laugh, you know?”

  It was true that Vogelsang had been up to the property at least twice already, and true, too, that his sense of humor was skewed, to say the least. I remembered the newspaper file he’d once produced for me. A manila folder crammed with the responses to ads he’d placed in The Berkeley Barb and The Bay Guardian. One of the ads read “Man or Beast? Love Animals … But Love Them the Right Way,” and gave a P.O. box number. He received twelve responses, one of which came from a male zookeeper who expressed a fondness for big cats and whips, and another of which invited him to spend the weekend on a sheep ranch in Marshall. Still another gave the vital statistics on a wire-haired pointer named Rex, suggested a liaison, and was cosigned with a woman’s name and the print of the dog’s right forepaw. Vogelsang never told me if he accepted.

  And then of course there were the stuffed animals and the mannequins and all the rest. Yes, I thought, he’s capable of it—and I even pictured him digging the old calendar out of the storage shed, his face lighting with perverse inspiration as he circled the date and nailed the thing to the wall. But in the same instant I felt the tug of superstition, and I saw an unknown hand, three decades back, painstakingly marking the date of some future event in a pathetic expression of longing—or worse, apprehension.

  While I was agonizing over a pencil smudge, Phil was scorching his eyebrows in an attempt to ignite and adjust the pilot on the water heater. He finally succeeded, with a whoosh that agitated the windows and singed his pompadour as neatly as if he’d paid twenty-five bucks for a flame cut. Abashed, I took charge of dinner. While we waited for the piéeGce de réeAsistance—hot water—I opened three cans of beer, an institutional-sized bucket of Malloy’s Red Hot Texas Chili, and a loaf of white bread. Exhausted, we sprawled in front of the stove, baking like pots in a kiln, the mud crusting and peeling from us in stringy lumps while we sipped warm beer and mopped up cold chili.

  Then we turned to the bathroom. There was a sink, a bathtub, a toilet (which, like the facilities on railway coaches, simply opened on the ground below; but whereas the railroad apparatus worked on the principle of fecal dissemination, ours relied on gravity and the slope of the ravine). The tub looked as if it had last been used to disinfect lepers, the porcelain pus-yellow and ringed with the strata of ancient immersions. It was a color that reminded me of the urinals at the old Penn Station, filth beyond redemption. I brought the Coleman lantern closer, and we examined the calcium-flecked fixtures, the husks of desiccated insects, the network of cracks that veined the inner surface of the tub like the map of a river delta. We stood there, as hushed as if we were gazing on the ruins of Lepcis Magna, until Gesh broke the silence. “Me first,” he said.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” I protested. “Let’s at least draw lots or something.”

  “I did most of the pushing out there,” Gesh said, but without much conviction. He looked like one of those New Guinea shamans who make masks of dried mud, his head big as a pumpkin, each strand of hair braided with dirt.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Phil’s tone was crisp, businesslike. He produced a box of wooden matches, shook out two with sober-faced gravity, halved one and turned his back. Then he swung round, the three matchsticks protruding from the plane of his clenched fist like pins in a pincushion, and presented his hand first to Gesh, then to me.

  Phil got the long one. “Flip you for seconds,” Gesh said, the coin already gleaming feebly in the dull glow of the lantern. “Tails,” I said, and lost.

  Phil ran the water till it went cold. Then he shrugged out of his clothes, flung them in a silty heap beneath the sink—where they would undergo a gradual petrifaction as the weeks dragged by—and eased into the tub, moaning like a man in the throes of the consummate orgasm.

  We watched from the doorway. “Five minutes,” I shouted, checking my Benrus.

  By the time my turn came round, the water was tepid, and the color and texture of the Mississippi in flood. No matter. This was real dirt I was covered with—stinking, fermenting, wild-woods dirt—and there would be no peace, no sweet surcease from care, until I got it off me. Besides, I reflected as I lowered myself into the soup, as last man to bathe I could linger as long as I liked.

  I didn’t. The water went cold almost immediately and the tap water was colder still. I lathered up, rinsed off, patted myself with a wet towel and made for the back bedroom, the ominous calendar and my damp sleeping bag. I was beat, every joint rubbed raw. Rain lashed at the roof, tiny feet scratched in the corners. I slept like a zombie.

  We were awakened by a thunderous pounding at the door—Anne Frank’s moment of truth, the men in the black boots come to drag us away. The sound reverberated through the house, deafening, insupportable, terrifying. We’d done nothing illegal—yet. We had no pot, no seeds even. There was no reason to be alarmed, but we were alarmed. No, not simply alarmed—panicked. I rushed out into the main room in my underwear, heart slamming at my ribs, to see Phil’s stricken face peering from the shadows of the front bedroom. It couldn’t have been later than six-thirty or seven. “Hallo?” a voice boomed. “Is anybody in there?”

  “Just a minute,” I called, dancing round the cold floorboards, my nervous system simultaneously flashing two conflicting messages: Be calm and Sauve qui peut. Phil had vanished. I could hear him thumping into his pants, coins spilling like chimes. Something crashed to the floor. “You’ll—you’ll have to go around to the other door,” I shouted, hugging my shoulders against the cold, “this one’s been …” I hesitated. “This one’s been nailed shut.”

  Gesh’s head appeared at the top of the stairwell, between the rails of the crude banister one of our troglodyte predecessors had erected. “Get rid of them,” he hissed. “We can’t have fucking people—“ but he cut himself off in mid-sentence: the kitchen door had begun to rattle.

  I reached the door at the same instant it was thrust open, and found myself standing toe-to-toe with the very archetype of the rural American, the living, breathing, foot-shuffling image of the characters who populate the truck stops of America, vote for neo-Nazis and mail off half their income to the 500 Club or the Church of the Flayed Jesus. Rangy, fiftyish, he was dressed in overalls, plaid hunting jacket and a Willits Feed cap. His face was seamed like a soccer ball, a wad of tobacco distended his cheek, he reeked of cowshit and untamed perspiration. “Hallo,” he roared—
he could have been greeting someone six miles away—and extended his hand. “Lloyd Sapers,” he said, still too loudly.

  “I ranch the place next door?”

  I shook his hand gravely, the elastic band of my Jockey shorts tearing at my flesh like masticating teeth. I was wondering both how to get rid of him and how to indicate, without arousing suspicion, that we were antisocial types who neither sought nor welcomed unannounced visits and least of all friendly relations with our neighbors, when he brushed past me and strode into the room as if he’d just assumed the mortgage on the place.

  “Seen the light last night,” he said, drawing himself up and spinning round like a flamboyant prosecutor exposing the sordid and incontrovertible truth to a scandalized world, “heard you, too. Comin’ up the road. All afternoon, it seems like.” And then he laughed, way up in the back of his throat.

  Somehow, things had gotten out of hand. Here I was, shivering like a wet dog and dressed only in my underwear, standing in the middle of the dirty, disused kitchen of a shack unfit for human occupation, engaged in a bantering conversation with an utter stranger, a man who by his very presence had to be considered an enemy. The discolored lump over my left eye began to throb. “Look,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, Mr. Sapers, but—”

  “Call me Lloyd.”

  “—but it’s early, and I—”

  He burst out with a laugh so sudden and sharp it startled me. “Early, oh yeah, I’ll bet,” he shouted, and flashed me a knowing grin.

  At this point, Phil appeared behind him, shuffling his feet and bobbing his head. His bad eye, I noticed, had gone crazy. Normally it was just slightly out of plumb, but under duress it began to rove as if it had a life of its own. Standing there in the gray light in his rumpled clothes, he could have been an elongated Jean-Paul Sartre contemplating a street full of merde.

  Sapers swung round on him and seized his hand. “Glad to meet you. It’s a pleasure, it really is. Haven’t had nobody out here for thirty years now,” he said, “except for that bonehead that was up here last summer in his house trailer—Smith or Jones or whatever the hell his name was. He was up to no good, I’ll tell you that.” The rancher delivered this information with a sad shake of his head, then pushed his cap back with a sigh that was actually a sort of yodel, and asked if we had any coffee.

  I don’t know what I was feeling at that moment—curiosity, shock, fear, annoyance. That someone else had been up here before us, and that he’d been up to no good—this was news. Who was he? Why hadn’t Vogelsang told us? And what about this nosy old loudmouth who was perched on the edge of the stove now, as comfortable as if he were counting sacks of hog manure in his own living room? We couldn’t afford to have him snooping around—or anybody else, for that matter. But how to get rid of him? Abstractedly, I watched Phil bend to the stove, stoke the embers and lay some scrapwood on top. Then I ducked out of the room to get dressed, as jittery as if I’d swallowed a handful of amphetamines.

  When I slapped back into the kitchen, hoisting my pants with one hand and clutching boots and socks in the other, Phil was heating water for coffee and Sapers was rattling on about the property, the weather, his wife, hoof-and-mouth disease, Ronald Reagan, taxes, deer hunting and just about anything else that came to his fevered mind. He was like a man who’d just emerged from six months in solitary, like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, Crusoe with a captive audience: he could not shut up.

  As if he’d read my thoughts, our neighbor looked up at that instant and fixed me with a gaze as steady and intense as a stalking predator’s. For an instant I saw something else in him, something raw and calculating, but then his eyes went soft, and he was the grinning bumpkin again. “Sure hope you don’t mind me going on like this, but unless I go into town I don’t have nobody much to talk to, outside of Trudy, that’s my wife, and my son Marlon. And Marlon, he’s a good boy, but he ain’t got much sense, if you know what I mean.” (I didn’t know what he meant, but in time I was to be enlightened on this score, as on a host of others. Marlon was nineteen, he weighed three hundred and twenty pounds, stood six feet tall, wore glasses that distorted his eyes until they looked like tropical fish in a hazy tank, and was so severely disturbed he’d spent the better part of his adolescence in the violent ward of the state mental hospital in Napa.)

  Phil fished a can of Medaglia d’Oro from one of the bags of groceries we’d hauled up with us, found a cracked cup in another, and poured the intruder a cup of coffee strained through a paper towel. “This used to be the old Gayeff place, you know,” Sapers said, blowing at his coffee. I wondered how he was going to manage to drink it and chew tobacco at the same time. “Ivan, now there was a character. Had hair like a nigger on him, kinky and black. A real tippler he was, too. He’d get himself liquored up on a Friday night, whale the piss out of his kids, blacken the old lady’s eyes for her and then run into the woods mother-ass naked and howl like a dog. Ivan the Terrible, we used to call him.”

  Suddenly Sapers looked as if he’d been stricken—he turned his head away and nearly dropped his cup. Then he leaned over and spat feebly in the sink. “Oh, but listen,” he stammered, avoiding my eyes, “I didn’t mean to … oh, what the hell: I may as well level with you. Mr. Vogelsang told me what you fellas are doing up here.”

  It was as if he’d announced that the place was surrounded. The words drilled into me like slugs, Phil scalded his hand and cursed sharply, I could feel the hairs rising on the back of my neck. “He what?”

  “Well, naturally. Since we live so close and all, he had to tell me.” The rancher paused to send a mauve stream of tobacco juice into the sink. Then he gulped at his coffee and glanced up tentatively: he’d put his foot in his mouth, and he knew it.

  By this time Gesh had appeared, looking terrible. He was scowling, as irascible and dyspeptic as a member of the Politburo, the scar that divided his eyebrow gleaming like the mark of Cain. I thought of the moment in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre when the interloper arrives at the prospectors’ camp and they decide to murder him rather than give up their secret.

  If there was blood in the air, Sapers didn’t seem to notice. He shook hands with Gesh, made a jocular reference to Phil’s haircut, spat in his coffee, and proceeded to enlighten us as to the nature and extent of the information he’d received from Vogelsang. The story came out gradually, but as soon as we began to get the drift of it, we played right along. It seemed that Vogelsang, thinking of everything, had told Sapers that he had some friends who were writers—really first-rate, mind you—but that they had a severe and debilitating problem with alcohol. He was going to let them live up at the camp for six or nine months so they could dry out, get some writing done and batten on sunshine and good clean country living. It was about as lame a story as I’d ever heard.

  “Hey,” Phil said, as soon as Sapers paused for breath, “I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve had my problems with the sauce, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m here to straighten out or lay down and die.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  “Yes, sure,” Sapers boomed, looking relieved. “I had an uncle that used to hit the bottle—Four Roses, quart and a half a day. It’s a disease is what it is. Just like cancer. And I’m shit-for-hell glad to see you boys determined to lick it.”

  Without warning, Gesh stepped forward, snatched the cup from the rancher’s hand and flung it against the wall. “Frankly,” he said, his voice curling round a snarl, “I don’t give a shit about your uncle, or you, or your half-assed opinions either. If you think you can come around here, brother, and lord it over us because we might’ve had a problem in the past, well you’re dead wrong, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  Sapers seemed to shrink in that instant, his neck as red and thin and sinewy as a turkey gobbler’s, his open shirt big around as a life jacket. Gesh loomed over him like the statue of the Commendatore come to life. “I … I … listen, I never—”

  Gesh shouted him down. “We have feelings, too, c
an you dig that? What do you think we are, some kind of human garbage or something? Huh?” Raging, Gesh jerked the leathery little rancher off the stove, both fists bunched under his collar. “We’re shit, right? Just because we take a drink once in a while? Right? Right?”

  Sapers was a man of straw, a bundle of clothes. He seemed to have shrunk away entirely, his essence concentrated in a reddened oval of face, stained teeth and hissing nostrils. “Don’t,” he panted, his hands tugging at Gesh’s wrists. “I drink! I drink myself! Me and Trudy, why—”

  But Gesh wasn’t listening. His features were contorted, his shoulders heaving with rage: he pulled Sapers to him like a lover, and then flung out his arms and sent the rancher reeling across the room. “Son of a bitch,” Gesh roared, advancing on him. “Son of a self-righteous, teetotaling, holier-than-thou bitch. I’ll kill you!”

  Our partner’s words hung in the air, ringing with the faint reverberations of saucepans and empty bottles, thrumming in our ears, but Sapers wasn’t there to appreciate the sonic aftereffects: he’d slammed through the kitchen door and bolted round the corner of the storage shed like a missionary in the land of the cannibals. We watched him out the kitchen window, jogging across the field, stumbling and then pitching down the slope of the ravine that divided our property from his. When he broke stride to glance over his shoulder and catch his breath, Gesh flung open the window and heaved a Coke bottle at him. “I’ll kick your ass,” Gesh bellowed, shaking his fist, and Sapers was off like a world-class sprinter, knees pumping, head bobbing, cutting a wide wet swath through the weeds until he disappeared in the cleft of the ravine.