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

  As soon as the rancher was out of sight, Gesh slammed the window down and collapsed as if he’d been hamstrung. He looked up at us, a big, shit-eating, Cheshire-cat grin on his face, and then he hooted and beat the floor like a drunken chimp. Phil had to grab hold of a chair for support, I was wiping hilarious tears from my eyes. “Hoo-hoo,” I said, the long double vowels trembling with appreciative vibrato. The kitchen was dingier than ever, last night’s chili-crusted plates in the sink, coffee stains on the wall, the shelves rife with dust and the tiny splayed tracks of rodents, and none of it mattered: we were laughing.

  “Critics’ Circle Award,” Phil gasped. “Best impression of a crazed degenerate—”

  “—by a crazed degenerate,” I added.

  “Ham of the year,” Phil said, applauding.

  Gesh folded his arms across his chest, stretched out his legs and leaned back against a thirty-year-old midden of blackened pans, nonreturnable bottles and eviscerated cans. “Shee-it,” he said.s

  Chapter 2

  That night we sat around the wood stove and listened to the rain pick at the Styrofoam on the roof. We were too tired to worry about baths. After routing Sapers and breakfasting on leftover chili, we’d spent the better part of the morning (in a drizzle that softened the landscape till it looked like a Monet, and coincidentally kept us wet as manatees) tinkering with the five-H.P. lawnmower engine that would theoretically furnish us with electricity. We’d approached it with caution. Separated from the mechanism that provided its ens, and bolted to a slab of iron, which in turn rested on a platform of cinder blocks, it was like a monument to a forgotten civilization, no more functional than one of Phil’s junk sculptures. It was cold, it was rusted, it was grease-clogged. There were belts, pulleys, wires, pipes, what I took to be a dynamo, and a thick black cord that looped over the roof of the storage shed and disappeared into the house. A crude metal bonnet protected the apparatus from the elements.

  “Gently,” I warned, as Gesh stepped up and gripped the plastic pull handle that was pinned to the top of the engine casing like a bow tie. He hesitated an instant, threw me a glance over his shoulder, and then leaned into the thing as if he were Indian-wrestling a mortal enemy. His arm jerked back three times in quick succession. From deep inside the inert block of metal there was a faint answering clank of gears. Nothing more. Gesh tried the pull half a dozen times before Phil suggested that the engine might be out of fuel. “Or maybe it’s old gas,” I reasoned. “You know, maybe it’s gone stale or something.”

  We siphoned gas from the Toyota and added a pint to the inch or two of pale liquid we discovered in the engine’s reservoir. I took my turn at the pull. Nothing. We removed the spark plug and cleaned it. We checked the belts and wires and laid our hands against the cold metal casing like faith healers. Still nothing. Gesh fiddled with the carburetor in a way that indicated he didn’t know what he was doing. Phil looked over his shoulder. I’ve never been mechanically inclined myself.

  We knocked off at noon, gulped reheated coffee and swallowed Velveeta sandwiches like pills, and then went out to put up the three-strand barbed-wire fence that would keep cattle and deer out of the growing areas. As soon as we left the house, the drizzle gave way to a deluge—plastic rain-colored sheets hammered into the ground, no sky above, buckling rivulets below. My nose was running. I felt as if I hadn’t been warm—or dry—in a month. “Okay,” Phil said, bending over a roll of wire, “you grab one end, I’ll get the other.”

  Stringing barbed wire involves the use of a come-along, an insidious forged-steel device that operates on the leverage principle. You bind the thing to a sturdy tree trunk, crank the wire till it’s tight enough to strum, and then affix said wire to a post or tree by means of a U-clip. It is nasty, back-breaking work. And what made it even nastier was the terrain we found ourselves confronting.

  When you’re growing a contraband crop you can’t just step out the front door, plow up a field and sow seeds as if you were raising corn, pumpkins and squash. No, you’ve got to be discreet. And with discretion in mind, Dowst had suggested we plant in widely separated patches—in the midst of existing stands of vegetation—as a means of subverting aerial detection. During the dry months, he’d explained, our plants would be the only viridescent vegetation for miles, and if concentrated, they would stand out like oases in a desert. Unfortunately, the only planting area he’d selected and laid out at this point happened to be located on a hillside with a slope comparable to that of Mauna Loa. We negotiated this hillside throughout the afternoon, shredding our hands, stumbling, lurching, falling, haphazardly stapling the wire to saplings and clumps of poison oak, cursing Vogelsang, cursing Dowst, cursing ourselves. It was dark when we quit.

  Gesh did the cooking. He tended his two frying pans and the big pot of steaming water on the back burner with the scrupulosity of the cuisinier at La Bourgogne. In one pan, he fried eggs; in the other, pork chops. The pot of water was eventually converted, through the miracle of modern science and the chemical wizardry of General Foods, to a steaming, plethoric mass of mashed potatoes. At the moment of truth, when all three dishes had simultaneously reached the apex of culinary perfection, Gesh inverted both frying pans over the pot of instant mashed potatoes and beat the resulting melange to a froth with a spoon the size of a Ping-Pong paddle. “Soup’s on,” he said, jabbing a serving spoon into the midst of the glutinous mess—it stood erect—and setting the pot down on the table.

  After dinner, we sipped cocktails (eight-ounce vodka gimlets, very dry) and stared at the wood stove. Phil hauled out his guitar and gave us a nasal rendition of “So Much Trouble” (My baby left me, my mule got lame,/Lost all my money in a poker game,/A windstorm came up just the other day,/Blew the house I lived in away), and then suggested we tell jokes to while away the time. We had to do something. It got dark at six and we had no television, no stereo, no radio, no lights even. I refilled the glasses while Phil told a hoary joke about a tractor, a bloodhound and a farmer’s daughter. The response was less than enthusiastic: neither Gesh nor I could even muster a grin. “Give me a break,” Phil said. He was seated cross-legged in front of the stove. His face, neck and hands were pocked with welts, as if he were suffering from chicken pox or scarlet fever. “It’s your turn, Felix,” he said, as I handed him his drink. “Tell us a joke.”

  I said I didn’t know any.

  “Gesh?” Phil said.

  Gesh looked first at me, then at Phil. The Coleman lantern squatted on the table behind him, and it threw his shadow over the room, enormous, jagged, looming and receding as he leaned forward to light a cigarette or set his glass down. “What’s the closest you ever came to dying?” he said.

  “Me?” Phil sipped at his drink, looking like a whiz kid who’s just been handed an intriguing equation. He produced a wad of toilet paper and blew his nose thoughtfully. “I don’t know—I guess it was the time I was working construction and nearly had a dump truck fall over on me. It was weird. I was too worried about looking stupid to be scared.” He pulled back the door of the stove and chucked in the wad of toilet paper: the room flared for an instant, then the iron door fell to and the shadows sprang back to reclaim the corners.

  “I was nineteen, working for minimum wage and doing construction on this golf course in Westchester—they were adding a back nine to go with the nine they already had, and we were doing everything from digging trenches for the irrigation pipe to raking up stones and seeding the fairways. Anyway, the foreman, he’s this character right out of The Untouchables or something—Italian, heavy accent, square as a wooden block—and he wants volunteers to drive these three broken-down dump trucks he’s got, hauling dirt. There’s about thirty of us there—a couple of black guys in their late twenties, early thirties, and the rest a bunch of long-haired college kids. I’d never driven a truck in my life, but when the foreman says ’Who can drive this thing?’ I raise my hand. I thought it was funny that the older guys—the black guys—never looked up from their shovels, but shit, t
he way I saw it, it was a hell of a lot easier to cruise around in a truck than break your ass digging ditches.”

  “I can relate to that,” I said, holding up my blistered hands.

  “So I get in the truck. The pedals are the size of frying pans, two feet from the floor, the steering wheel’s like an extra-large pizza or something, there’s this dumping gear I’ve never seen before.” Phil looked up at me. “You remember that summer I worked at Loch Ledge.” I nodded.

  “Anyway, six guys are coming with me. Two in the cab, the rest hanging on to the outside. We’re going to pick up a load of dirt and then bring it across the property and spread it. So I get down there at the base of this big hill and there’s another truck in front of me, idling, while this guy in a caterpillar—union worker, middle-aged, making two hundred bucks a day—fills up the truck. This is great, I’m thinking. Getting paid for just sitting here.

  “Then it’s my turn. He fills me up so the dirt is mounded up over the roof of the truck, stones clanking off as I grind it into gear and head up this narrow dirt road, real steep, up the side of a cliff that overlooks this little stream they dammed up for a water hazard. Halfway up, in first gear, the bands start slipping. I’m going full out, foot to the floor, and the truck is standing still—overloaded, I guess. So I hit the brake. Nothing. The engine’s screaming, the truck is sliding backwards and I’m totally powerless.

  “That’s when the other guys abandon ship. College kids, like me. Stupid, crater-faced, do-or-die types. They leap off the sides, open the door and jump. I don’t know what to do, don’t even think about it. All I know is the foreman’ll eat me for breakfast if I wreck the truck, so I just hang on, foot to the floor, bands slipping, the truck inching backwards. I was dead, from stupidity, from not knowing that I could die, from not even considering flinging open the door and jumping.”

  Phil was grinning. “But I’m not dead—though I think I will be if we have to go through much more of the sort of bullshit we went through today.”

  “So what happened?” Gesh asked.

  “Oh. It was simple. The guy on the bulldozer saw what was happening, steamed up the hill like he was coming off the starting flag at Le Mans, caught me with the bucket and pushed the whole business right up the road and onto level ground. I was within about three feet and ten seconds of being crushed under Christ knows how many tons of dirt and I didn’t even really know it.”

  Ice cubes rattled in our glasses (we’d been provident enough to bring up six bags of ice in a pair of plastic coolers). Wood hissed in the stove. We mulled over Phil’s story in silence for a moment before Gesh turned to me. “How about you, Felix?”

  I laughed. “The closest I ever came?” I laughed again, remembering. “It’s short and sweet,” I said, “nothing like Phil’s. But it’s weird and mystical almost. Did I ever tell you about this, Phil?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It was when I was living in New York with Ronnie and we rented that summer place for two weeks—I think it was about a year after we got married. You remember the place, Phil.”

  Phil took a long pull at his drink and made a face. “In Lake Peekskill, right?”

  In Lake Peekskill. A bungalow that belonged to my Uncle Irv and that stank of cat shit and mold. We’d been living in the city and we had no money. Irv let us have the place cheap. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  “That’s the place,” I said. “You remember how it smelled?”

  Phil nodded, Gesh leaned forward. I told the story.

  There was sun the first couple of days. I set up a volleyball net, swam across the lake, charred meat on the outdoor grill. I was Mr. Country all of a sudden. Ronnie did crossword puzzles. Then the rain started. A low-pressure system that hovered over New Jersey like a judgment and gave us four solid days of thunderstorms. When the sun finally poked through again I was burning to get out—we were wasting our vacation. I asked Ronnie if she wanted to take a hike in the woods.

  “The woods? Isn’t there enough woods right here to satisfy you?” We were hemmed in by maple, willow, white birch. Hummocks of unmowed grass fled from the wall of the house, ducked under a barbed-wire fence and flowed out into a field where cows were lowing. I shrugged my shoulders. What I wanted was deep woods, solitude, the pale clerestory light that filters through the trees and settles over you like an ancestral memory. Ronnie eased into a lawn chair with a tube of tanning butter, her prescription shades, a magazine and a radio. I told her I’d be back in a couple of hours.

  It was August. Humid, the trees drowning in green. I drove to the state park and followed a rutted dirt road through a close dark tunnel of hardwood and pine. It was a one-lane road. There were no other cars. Eventually I reached a primitive bridge that might or might not have supported the weight of the car. Afraid to chance it, I backed off the road as far as I could and stepped out to have a look at the stream rushing under the bridge.

  The stream was high and roiled, swollen with runoff from the previous days’ storms, hurling debris over its banks, slamming at the base of the bridge as if it would annihilate it. I don’t know what I was thinking of—I was a city dweller, and I’d never been out in the woods alone in my life. Perhaps it was some recollection of Boy Scout camp or the cabin my parents had rented when I was younger, or perhaps it was simply an instinctual need to experience nature in some primary, unsanitized way—at any rate, I decided to follow the stream into the green tangle that swallowed it up.

  If I had vague stirrings of the excitement that must have infected a Hilary or a Cabeza de Vaca, they were quelled almost instantly—others had been here before me. With a vengeance. They’d guzzled beer, blasted shotguns, changed babies, gobbled tortilla chips and carved their names in tree trunks. As I went on, though, following a rough path that dodged in and out of the tumble of rocks bordering the streambed, the signs of civilization began to disappear. There was still the occasional Schlitz can or shell casing, but I began to get the impression that I’d penetrated more deeply into the forest than the average day-tripper, and I felt a swelling of pride. When I came across a natural pool fed by a steady plunging waterfall, I settled down on a rock and ate the Hershey bar I’d brought along, careful to fold up the wrapper and tuck it in my pocket.

  The water gulped and hissed like a dozen Jacuzzis, birds whistled in the branches, sunlight broke through the treetops to fracture the surface of the pool. I felt at peace, in tune with things, I felt like Huck Finn, Nick Adams. There were no serpents in the forest, there was no poison ivy, nothing to bite or sting or discourage. Why hadn’t I done this more often? I thought, munching candy. This was great, this was exhilarating, this was nature.

  It was at that moment that a thunderous, splintering crack sounded behind me and I was suddenly raked along the right side of my body and swept aside as if I were nothing, a dustball, a speck of dander; then there was a booming crash and an explosion of water that soaked me through. A tree had fallen. My arm was scraped raw, my clothes were wet, there was bark and sawdust in my hair, ants scrambling down the back of my neck. The base of the tree lay beside me, as big around as the Washington Monument; the far end of it was sunk into the pool at my feet.

  I’d told the story before. It was at this point in the recitation that I looked up and held my audience’s eyes, the old loon with his hand on the wedding guest’s arm: “If I’d been sitting twelve inches to the right, I would have been crushed.”

  Gesh whistled. “That’s some story.”

  “CITY MAN HEARS TREE FALLING IN FOREST,” Phil said, quoting an imaginary headline and hooting into his gimlet.

  My hand trembled as I lifted my drink from the box of canned beets that doubled as an end table. I always felt odd telling that story, no matter how I tried to make light of it. I hadn’t been crushed, I hadn’t contracted leukemia at fourteen or run my motorcycle into a fence. To remember it, to describe it, was to admit not only that I could have been crushed in any one of a thousand ways, but that inevitably I
would be, as all of us would. It was a thing you didn’t think about. Maybe that’s why Gesh suggested it.

  I stood abruptly and began to rifle through the bags of groceries that lined the crude kitchen counter and competed with garbage for space on the floor. Shaken, light-headed, filled with the soul-barer’s exhilarating sense of communion and absolution, I let my fingers do the thinking. Cold tin, cold aluminum. Shapes. The muffled clatter of air-tight cans. Finally I came up with a can of black olives. I borrowed Phil’s Swiss Army knife, serrated the lid and sucked back the oily dark essence of Greece—or rather the San Fernando Valley—and settled back down beside the stove.

  Then it was Gesh’s turn.

  He fingered the scar that split his eyebrow. “I got this in a car crash,” he said. “I was driving, shit-faced drunk. A red Triumph I borrowed from a girl I was going out with. Went through a stone wall at sixty and the thing burst into flame. Some stranger pulled me out. I was unconscious.”

  He rolled up his shirt to expose a triad of short angry welts. “And this I got down in Mexico. Some shithead in a bus station said something to me in Spanish I didn’t like the sound of, so I hit him. He stabbed me three times.”

  I said something weighty like “Holy shit.”

  Gesh looked pleased. He liked to think of himself in heroic terms—biggest, toughest, smartest, strongest, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, eat the most Quaaludes and still stand up and wash the dishes. Raised in Echo Park and educated in abandoned clapboard houses and the alleys out back of Sunset Boulevard, he’d been through it all—gang fights, juvenile hall, doping, moping, expulsion from his high school honor society, and two years of the worst the UCLA classics department could dish out—and he never let you forget it. After a pause of suitable dramatic duration, he said, “But I’ve been closer than that, a lot closer.”

  We leaned forward.

  “It was the Sirens,” he said, “they lured me onto the rocks. One siren, anyway. Her name was Denise. Short, tight ass, skin like ice cream—like toasted-almond ice cream. I met her on the beach in Venice, summer before last. We were having a party and she was somebody’s cousin or sister or something, in a white two-piece that offered up her nipples like hors d’oeuvres. She walked up to me and traced the scars on my stomach with the tip of her finger. ’Where’d you get that?’ she says. ’Gall bladder?’ When I told her, her eyes went funny for a second, narrowing like little periods and then opening wide, green light, let’s go.