Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

  “One deer,” Dowst said, holding up a single finger for emphasis, “could eat twenty plants in a night. And the barbed wire does nothing for them—they just jump right over it.”

  Gesh suddenly got to his feet, stalked across the room and out the door. Left ajar, the door swung lazily back on its hinges, and the room filled with the clatter of the generator. “What’s with him?” Dowst said. I shrugged. The noise was excruciating. I was about to get up and slam the door when the lights failed and the roar abruptly died—with a choking, throttled cough and an explosion of backfire. One thousand, two thousand, three—I counted off the seconds as we sat in absolute, intergalactic darkness, the silence drawn over us like a cloak. Then a light appeared, wavering, and Gesh stepped back into the room with a Coleman lantern.

  “Too much racket,” he murmured. “Makes me nervous.”

  Vogelsang was nodding in affirmation. He’d repaired the generator as a concession to our needs, but I knew he was against it. Perhaps—and the thought was like the first trickle of gravel that precipitates a landslide—perhaps he’d perforated the muffler or something to make it louder still, his way of subtly demonstrating that comfort wasn’t worth the price of exposure. Certainly the thing could be heard from the main road, and who knew what sort of visitors it might attract—people like Sapers, or worse. (Sapers’s place glowed with cheap, silent, efficient wattage, incidentally. The PG&E line climbed the mountain as far as his house, and as I would one day discover, he’d paid a tidy sum for the privilege. But that’s another story.) “I think you’re right,” Vogelsang said, and I suddenly realized it was the first time he and Gesh had agreed on anything.

  Gesh set the lantern on the table, stepped between Vogelsang and Dowst, eased himself down beside Phil and reached for his plate. Dowst murmured something to Vogelsang about the temperature in the greenhouse, Gesh addressed himself to a mound of pinto beans, and Aorta turned to me and asked, as if she’d been considering the question all evening, “You into music?”

  “Music?” I echoed, as if I’d never heard the term before. “Yeah. Sure. Of course. Who isn’t?”

  “Ever hear of the Nostrils?”

  I’d already failed. I shook my head sadly.

  “I sing with them.”

  “Oh, yeah? Really?” This was the first time she’d initiated a conversation, the first time she’d said anything in my hearing other than yes, no, hello, goodbye. I was interested. I was also, after three celibate weeks on the mountain, consumed with lust. I studied the slope of her breast, the swell of her calf, the neat red laces of her suede hiking boots, and tried to picture her engaged in deviant acts. Outside, in the greenhouse, seeds were sprouting.

  She shifted her buttocks, bent to her plate and took a forkful of meat. “Yeah,” she said, white teeth, black lips, chewing. “I think you’d like us.” She was about to say more when Gesh cleared his throat and said, “So, Herb, why don’t you tell us about Jones.”

  Silence.

  Vogelsang looked uncomfortable. He looked besieged, hunted, weary, looked like a man who could think of better ways to spend his time—pressing pasta and stuffing weasels, for instance. I wondered how long he could keep his equanimity. “Who?” he said.

  “You know: Jones. Dude that was up here last year, growing pot?” Gesh never stopped pushing, but he was right. If Vogelsang was hiding something, we were entitled to know about it.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t tell us,” I said. “It seems pretty significant, doesn’t it, to know that somebody tried to farm the place before us?”

  “No big deal,” Dowst said, cutting in. “We knew he’d been busted—”

  “Busted?” There was a chorus of cries.

  “—and we figured he’d probably been doing some farming up here, but we never found any evidence of it.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll bet you looked real hard, too,” Gesh said.

  “Busted?” I repeated, incredulous.

  “On the highway, Felix,” Vogelsang said, in control again, “miles from here. The way I heard it, he was sitting in a line of cars—they were doing roadwork and only one lane was open—and he tossed a joint to this long-haired ditchdigger. Five miles up the road the CHP nailed him for possession. Stupid, that’s all.”

  “But he had a trailer up here,” I said. “You must have known he wasn’t up here for his health.”

  “Yes, well. As Boyd said, we assumed he’d been doing a little cultivating, but that really didn’t affect us. He had an address someplace in North Beach. I figure he got a little paranoid after the bust, harvested early and cleared out—if he harvested at all.”

  Dowst smoothed the collar of his shirt and then set the plastic bowl down beside the plastic utensils. He could have been on a camping trip to commemorate his tenth-year Andover reunion. “So there’s nothing to connect Jones with the place—it’s irrelevant. Jones is irrelevant.”

  “Not if El Ranchero Grande next door knows about him,” Phil countered. “ ’Up to no good’ is what he said.”

  “Yeah.” I was getting incensed, strung-out, suspicious. “And if Sapers thinks Jones was up to no good, what do you suppose he thinks we’re doing? Writing? With a come-along?”

  Vogelsang shrugged. He looked tired.

  Jail cells, I thought, dawn raid, yellow toilet, hardened criminals, buggery. I was picturing the three of us, shackled together, jackets pulled up over our heads, half a dozen Jerpbaks prodding us with nightsticks, when Gesh suddenly hammered the floor with his fist. He was shouting. “Come on, Vogelsang, you son of a bitch—you put Jones up to it, didn’t you? Huh? Just like us.”

  Aorta’s eyes glowed like neon. Dowst swiped at his hair. I could hear crickets or locusts or something going at it outside as if they were laying down the backing track for a horror film. With exaggerated calm, Vogelsang leaned forward to pour himself a glass of wine. He took a long sip, and then held Gesh’s eyes. “I’ll show you the deed to the property,” he said. “I bought the place in February. From a fellow named Strozier—Frederick C. W. Strozier.” Vogelsang shifted his gaze now, expanding his field of vision to include Phil and me. “Go ask him. Maybe Jones was working for him”—giving us the Charlie Manson stare—“just as you, my friends, are working for me.”

  Gesh muttered an obscenity, his voice so thick it could have been dubbed. I wondered if he’d been rat-holing Quaaludes.

  “You’re in or you’re out,” Vogelsang said, hard now, no patience left, the bargain-driver and market-manipulator. “Either trust me or pack it in.”

  I knew at that moment I should take him up on it—pack it in, get out, get clear. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. We’d just got there, the seeds were burgeoning in the dark moist earth of the greenhouse, Rio awaited. “Okay,” I said, answering for all of us. “Okay. But no more secrets.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “What about the calendar?”

  No reaction.

  “You know what I mean, Vogelsang, come on. The calendar, the one you dug up in the shed and hung in the bedroom.” I felt something rising in my throat—gas, maybe. My heart had begun to hammer. “The calendar,” I repeated. “The joke.”

  He looked up at me as if he hadn’t heard, looked up as if he were deaf and dumb. His face was blank, no glimmer of comprehension in his eyes. He could have been aphasic, could have been a tourist who had no grasp of English. Worse: he could have been innocent.

  Like the Savior at Golgotha, Vogelsang stayed three days. On the morning of the third day he arose and assembled us for instruction in the use and maintenance of firearms. We stood out front of the house confronting a series of makeshift targets—bottles, cans, Mason jars, a grid of two-by-fours faced with plywood and clumsily inscribed with sagging concentric circles. This last, mounted on stilts and angling backward like an artist’s easel, explained the persistent hammering that had jolted me awake at the hour of the wolf. I breathed on my hands and then thrust them into my pockets. It was foggy and cold, dew beading our vehicles and the mounds of rus
ted machine parts that lay scattered in the high grass like the remnants of a forgotten civilization. Clumps of mist clung to the trees like balls of hair in the bristles of a brush. The model hole, a few yards to our left, was water-filled and rimmed with fingers of ice.

  I was contemplating our new vehicle—an open Jeep of ancient vintage with big heavy-grid tires that had unfortunately gone bald—when Dowst emerged from his van, clean-shaven and alert. There was a notebook clenched under his arm and a row of pens clipped to his pocket—he could have been back at Yale, loping off to attend an early lecture on bryophytes. He slogged his way through the weeds, sidestepped the hole and joined us on the improvised firing line. “Going to take notes?” I said. Phil giggled. Dowst gave me an odd look, held out the notebook and flipped through the pages for me. I saw maps of the property, pages of calculations and formulas, notes on fertilizers, soils, mean temperatures and annual rainfall. Humbled, I ducked my head and spat in the grass.

  Then the door slammed behind me and I turned to watch as Aorta picked her way toward us. “Good morning,” she croaked, her voice ragged and raw. The cropped hair lay flat against the crown of her head; she was makeup-less and huddled in her silver jacket like a runaway. I rubbed my palms together and gave her a weak smile.

  “Anything happens,” Vogelsang was saying, “and your obvious choice is the shotgun.” His eyes were hard, glacial, veins stood out in his neck. I was thinking of drill instructors, Fort Hood, recruits dying in basic training—eighteen years old and their hearts give out—when Vogelsang handed me the gun.

  I didn’t know what to do. I was prepared to fire the thing—in fact, in a childish sort of way I was looking forward to it. But not first. No. First I wanted to watch Vogelsang bring it to his shoulder, sight down the barrel, squeeze off a round or two; I wanted to hear the roar, see the target totter, gauge the force of the recoil. Life was full of surprises, most of them unpleasant. Why rush into things?

  Vogelsang was lecturing, his words coming at me as if from a great distance: “Ithaca. Twelve-gauge. Pump. Double-ought shot.” I held the gun stiffly, like an artificial limb. Flesh soup, I thought. Ground round. Then Vogelsang took my arm and indicated a target set apart from the rest—a pillow perched atop a peeling three-legged end table, no more than thirty feet away. He had painted a Kilroy face on it, eyes, nose, slashes for eyebrows, and a big grinning circus mouth. “Go ahead, Felix,” he said. “Let it rip.”

  I felt silly. “That?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I put the gun to my shoulder and squinted down the barrel. The sight was a flap of metal, an M, and I peered through the cleft of it with one eye shut, lining up first the table, and then the big sloppy mouth of my bitterest enemy, the crop-stealer, the desperado, the rip-off artist. It was like taking a photograph. Dying color. I concentrated on an image of Robin Hood splitting arrows, held my breath, and pinned the trigger.

  There was a roar. The table splintered, the pillow exploded in a puff of feathers: now you see it, now you don’t. I was startled—not only by the volume of the blast but by the violence of the recoil, which slammed at my collarbone like a karate chop—so startled I nearly dropped the gun. Through the ringing in my ears I could hear Vogelsang’s laughter. I suppose it was funny, my juggling the thing as if it were hot, my confusion, my fear. The ineluctable modality of the risible. “Well shot, Felix,” he said between gasps. “You see my point?”

  I saw his point. Where table and pillow had formerly stood, there were only feathers, sifting down like a meteorological aberration. There was no reason even to aim the thing. Just blast away. Destruction. Devastation. Annihilation. I saw his point. But I didn’t like the way in which he’d made it. Not especially. So I turned round, hands trembling, and pumped another shell into the chamber—Vogelsang’s face went cold; beyond him I could see Gesh, Phil, Aorta, Dowst, smiles freezing as if the wind had suddenly shifted and brought with it a whiff of something foul—and then swung leisurely on the other targets.

  “Hey!” Vogelsang waved his arms. “No!”

  I wasn’t listening: I was aiming. Fifty feet. What was that—a cider jug? Yes. I could read the label. Apple Time. Unsweetened. “Felix!”

  Cold steel, hot blast: the gun answered for me. And then again, and again.

  Chapter 6

  In all, including Phil and me, there were seven customers in the caféeA when the CHP cruiser swung off 101 and nosed into the parking lot. We were sitting at a window booth. Relaxing. Eating. Enjoying a supply run and a two-hour break from the routine of the summer camp. In the booth across from us, a brittle-haired woman in her mid-fifties carped at her daughter, while the daughter’s daughter, a two-year-old, kicked at the tabletop. The other denizens of the place—aside from the withered old crone in the checked mini-skirt who performed the multiple functions of chef, waitress and cashier—were two old men, in identical overalls and sun-bleached shirts, who sat at opposite ends of the counter, stolidly blowing into cups of coffee.

  Nearly four weeks had passed since we’d last seen Vogelsang, and during that time we’d made determined progress, managing to enclose eight of twelve growing areas, fence the property line between our place and Sapers’s, dig twelve hundred holes, and reverentially transplant every last one of the healthy seedlings Dowst had sprouted. Unfortunately, less than twenty percent of the seeds had proven viable, and we wound up with only about fifteen hundred seedlings, a third of which fell prey to some mysterious enervating force in the greenhouse—fungus, leafhoppers, gamma rays, locusts, who could say? Dowst had assured us that he would come up with additional seeds to replace those that had failed. Of course, we would have to scale down our original estimate a bit, but still, even though the second crop would get into the ground a bit late, we should nevertheless come close to the full thousand pounds we’d projected. He was an optimist, Dowst. We looked at it philosophically. So we harvested nine hundred pounds instead of a thousand. Big deal. We’d be rich anyway.

  I watched as the cruiser slunk across the lot, weaving in and out of potholes with a muscular grace that suggested a carnivore at ease—a panther, belly full, gliding along the path to its lair. Behind the windshield, which alternately reflected the clouds and darkened to transparency, I could make out the rigid forms of the officers themselves, twin pairs of mirror shades, a riot gun framed menacingly in the rear window. I looked away. And found that I was clutching a laminated menu: Two Eggs Any Style, Super Chili Beef Burger, Corn Dog—Try It! The waitress hovered over us with pencil and pad, and Phil, his voice saturated with ennui, was ordering. “The special,” he said. “That’s the stuffed cabbage with chili, right? And it comes with a side of coleslaw?”

  The waitress nodded her ravaged head. “That’s right, honey.” She must have been seventy, thin, with a sunken chest and flat feet. Her hair was dyed moonlit brown, and it played girlishly across her cheek as she bent forward.

  “I’ll take the Super Chili Beef Burger, too,” Phil said. “On the side. And another glass of milk, please.”

  I ordered tuna on rye and a bowl of soup. Violins, converging on the maudlin strains of yet another country hit, whined from hidden speakers. Clouds expanded and contracted along the backbone of the sky. A fly batted at the window.

  Then the door swung open behind me, footsteps scuffed across the floor, and the grid of seats heaved as a pair of oversized hominids settled into the booth at my back. I stole a glance out the window and saw that the cruiser was empty. “I’m telling you, you just can’t operate that fast,” a voice snapped in my ear before descending to an urgent rasping whisper. A second voice, also whispering, interrupted to hiss a reply. The back of my neck began to itch.

  I reached for my coffee cup, found that it was empty, and signaled for the waitress. She looked up alertly, slid the Pyrex pot from the stove and started down the aisle—only to continue past as if she hadn’t seen me. She halted opposite the newly occupied booth at my back. “Can I get you boys some coffee?” she said. There was a pau
se in the disputation as both voices broke off to breathe “Please,” and then the rasping continued, covered momentarily by the splash and trickle of hot liquid. Phil reached across the table to nudge me, then indicated a point over my right shoulder and broke into a grin. “You see who just joined us?” he whispered.

  I scanned the front page of the local paper, trying to ignore him. FUNDS CUT FOR RODENT CONTROL, I READ. HARRIET SEARS HONORED BY FATIMAS OF THE FEZ. DROUGHT IN NAMIBIA. And then, with a shock that built in my chest like the thump of a boxer’s speed bag, I came across the following:

  ALL IN A (FIRST) DAY’S WORK

  Officers of the CHP detained two Bay Area men early this morning when a routine traffic stop turned up nearly 3 kilograms of marijuana seeds and a small quantity of cocaine. Esig “Bud” Jones, 29, of San Francisco, and Aurelio Ayala, 26, of Daly City, were apprehended near Pt. Cabrillo on the Coast Highway. A spokesman for the Highway Patrol speculated that the seeds may have been intended for local cultivation in the highly lucrative “sinsemilla” marijuana trade that many feel has become one of the county’s biggest cash crops. Both men are awaiting arraignment in the county jail. Bail has not yet been set.

  This is where the story ends. But it had its beginnings in the Ukiah substation yesterday evening when patrolman John Jerpbak reported for his first day of duty with the Ukiah division. Officer Jerpbak, a native of Willits who many will remember as a star halfback for the Willits Wolverines, had requested the transfer from his post in Lake Tahoe because, in his words, “I wanted to do my part in fighting this thing right here where my friends and family (Cont. Page 2)

  My fingers were trembling. We were thirty-five miles from the ocean, and yet the surf was roaring in my ears. Phil leaned across the table and gestured toward the young mother: “You know, she’s not half bad.” I didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. I scanned the room like an impala checking the high grass for movement, the presence at my back swelling to nightmare proportions, and then turned the page.