Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

  I dialed like a man in a burning building. Come on, I thought, counting the clicks, and then the information operator was on the wire, quick and efficient, and I scribbled the number on my bar napkin and called collect.

  “Hello?” Dwight’s voice sounded distant, weary. For an instant I thought I’d wakened him—but no, it was just after ten in New York.

  The long-distance operator interceded with a deadpan impression of Desi Arnaz: “Colleck call for any wan from Fee-lix: will you ’cept the charge?”

  “What?” A tapping came over the line, and I envisioned a repairman in Kansas hammering a downed wire back in place. “Yes, yes—put him on.”

  “Dwight?”

  “Felix?”

  “How you doing?”

  “Fine,” he said. “What’s up?”

  I couldn’t tell him, couldn’t give him specifics anyway. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m a little depressed.” Just then Shirelle threw back her head and laughed like an abandoned old whore with a meter on every orifice. “Did I tell you I’m rooming with Phil?”

  We talked for half an hour before I understood the reason I’d called. “Listen, Dwight,” I said finally, “you think you could read me something from one of your notebooks?”

  Dwight was a compulsive record-keeper—no, he was pathological, half a step removed from the crazy who keeps his own feces in labeled fruit jars. Not only did he list every experience he’d ever had—everything from breaking up with his girlfriend, rupturing his spleen or being victimized by pickpockets in Madrid to buying a pair of shoelaces—he kept track of every meal he’d eaten, the clothes he wore, states, counties and municipalities visited and distances traveled, gifts given and received, feelings felt, gas, electricity and water consumed, the number of points he’d scored in an intramural basketball game in junior high, cab fares, tips, the books he’d read, movies he’d seen (including where and with whom), records, shoes and nose drops purchased, every bowel movement, hiccough, belch and whimper of his life. He could tell you how many streetlamps line FDR Drive and how many times he’d passed under them, give you a blow-by-blow account of a trip he’d made to visit his grandparents when he was thirteen, describe Radio City Music Hall in terms of the number and texture of the seats.

  I could appreciate what he was trying to do—each of us to a greater or lesser degree has the same impulse, after all, the same need to impose order on our sloppy irrational lives in the face of an indifferent universe. I could appreciate it, and benefit from it as well. My past and Dwight’s intersected at any number of points: he’d recorded my history, too.

  Within moments I could hear the rustle of turning pages, and then Dwight’s familiar nasal tones: “Know how many points you scored against Fox Lane on January 18, 1967?”

  Nineteen sixty-seven. Amazing. I had a vision of myself—alive, free, untrammeled and untroubled, dribbling an inflated sphere up and down a polished wooden floor as if nothing else in the world mattered. “How many?” I breathed.

  “Twelve.” A page turned. “You remember who else was on the team?”

  I listed them, all of them, right down to the benchwarmers—the thyroid freaks with the pinheads and the muscular little guys who weren’t quite quick enough to make first-string guard.

  Then he was reading: “June 10, 1969. Picked up Felix at eight p.m. in my father’s Charger, took fifteen point two gallons of gas at thirty-one cents a gallon for a total of four seventy-one, and then drove to Port Chester to pick up Sherrie Ryan and Ginger Beardsley. I was wearing my new maroon bellbottoms and …”

  The voice went on, precise and evenly modulated, the voice of order and reason, the voice that proved my past and promised the future. I just listened, nodding, memory blooming like a field of clover. We must have talked for an hour and a half. I was working on my third beer and sixth egg when we finished, and feeling that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. “Dwight,” I said, my voice a pant of gratitude, “thanks.” The receiver fell into its cradle with a click gentle as a kiss.

  When I finally looked up, I saw that the Indians had gone—the light over the pool table had been extinguished and the rear of the bar faded into shadow. The two epicures at the bar were still there, though, and I saw that they’d been joined by a hefty young couple who brooded over a pair of highballs like inspectors from the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms. Shirelle was nowhere to be seen.

  Suddenly George Pete’s crony lifted his head and roared, “Soak them beans, for Christsake!” as if he were announcing a cavalry charge. The other old fellow seemed pretty far gone—he just waved his hand vaguely.

  I was feeling better than I had for weeks. I’d made my decision (of course I was staying; I’d go to jail forever—welcome it—lock myself in at Attica with savage perverts or swim out to Devil’s Island, before I’d let down my friends and buddies), and it was as if I’d been set free, the fetters loosened, no more vulture come to feed on my liver. How could I even have thought of quitting? There was nothing more vital than the kind of friendship I had with Dwight, with Phil, with Gesh, and it was worth any sacrifice to sustain it. The alcohol spoke to me, my abraded nerves sank into their sheaths like sleeping tortoises. I felt light, holy, ecstatic: I could have gotten up and kissed everybody in the place.

  What I would do, I decided, was have one more cognac to celebrate the rite of passage I’d endured, and then head on up the hill to the summer camp, get a good night’s sleep and go out in the morning to cultivate my garden, as resigned and sensible as Candide on the shores of Marmora. As if on cue, Shirelle reappeared, emerging from the door behind the bar with a case of no-name scotch, gin, vodka and rum. I smirked at her like some dapper character out of a forties movie and knocked over my empty beer glass. “Shirelle,” I said, my tongue somehow glued to the roof of my mouth, “one more Remy, please. With a soda back.” And then, as if this simple request needed amplification: “I’m celebrating.”

  Shirelle’s eyes were veined with red, as if she’d just finished a hundred laps in an over-chlorinated pool. The bottle floated in her hand like a helium balloon, and on the first pass she missed the glass entirely, splashing bar, coaster, her left hand and my right with expensive imported booze. Then she connected, filled the water glass halfway, wordlessly snatched up my money and lurched over to join the fat-faced pair at the other end of the bar.

  “Half a quart of vinegar, a box of peppercorns and a whole shaker of salt—the whole damn thing—to a gallon of water,” George Pete’s crony said.

  “What’s that for?” asked the broader of the two new arrivals, who seemed to be female. “Footsoak?”

  “Oh, gawd.” George Pete’s crony rolled his bulging eyes. “Ever’body’s a iggoramus tonight—that’s my genuine Chesapeake Bay crab boil.”

  The other old boy, the one in coveralls, was asleep, hands in his lap and forehead pressed to the bar as if he were a devotee of some obscure Far Eastern religion.

  I felt warm. A voice mewled over the jukebox: Well, here I stand,/All alone with a broken heart,/I took three bennies/And now my semi-truck won’t start. Time escaped me. I had another cognac.

  It was then, just after I’d ordered the second post-phone-call drink—or was it the third?—that I felt a pressure on my arm and turned to see that someone had taken possession of the stool next to mine. I was too far gone to be startled: it was Savoy. Her hand was on my arm, a tall frosted glass of Coke sizzled on the bar before her. She was wearing a low-cut blouse and one of those complicated uplift bras that separate the bosoms and present them like ripe mangoes. “Hi,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Oh,” I said, shrugging, waving my hand and licking the tips of my fingers like a third-base coach in the throes of a seizure, “it’s no big thing. Been keeping busy, that’s all.” Eugene’s locket clung to her throat like a magnet. I wanted to lick it.

  “Yeah?” she said, grinning wide. “You living around here now or what?”

  Boom, went the jukebox.
Boom, boom, boom.

  “Wanna dance?” I said.

  She shook her head no and took a sip of her Coke. Pink lipstick, white straw. “Your name’s Felix, right?”

  I nodded. “And you’re Savoy.” I grinned like a deviate, like a billy goat.

  She ignored me. Sucked thoughtfully at her straw a moment. “So you guys living up here now or what?” she said, repeating her question with a slight but significant variation.

  “Blood raw!” roared George Pete’s crony.

  His interlocutor, who’d partially revived and propped his head on a bent elbow, squinted one eye and hissed, “Your ass!”

  “Not really,” I lied.

  She laughed, a rich musical sound that inflamed every fiber of my reproductive tract. “No,” she said, leaning into me, “I really want to know. I like you guys, I do.”

  “Well, if you put it that way,” I said, making a stab at wit and raising my eyebrows to acknowledge the sexual innuendo, “we live in Berkeley, but we’ve been coming up here a lot—oh, it must be three or four times now—to go fishing, you know, trout and all.”

  “Come off it. You’re living up by Lloyd Sapers’s place, aren’t you?”

  “Sapers? Never heard of him.”

  She looked offended, her mouth puckered in a little moue. “What do you take me for—stupid or something?”

  “Hah!” shouted George Pete’s toothless compatriot, apropos of some culinary conviction forcefully expressed. “Hah! Hah! Hah! Don’t make me laugh.”

  Savoy was staring into my eyes, cold and intent. A moment ago I’d felt warm, lit up, ready to lick the world: now I felt cold, cold, cold. “Come off it,” she repeated, as if she’d forgotten her lines. “Come off it, will you? Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there.”

  PART 3

  Efflorescence

  Chapter 1

  In June, the weather altered abruptly. Whereas before we’d shivered through a perpetual riveting downpour that made every moment of hole-digging or fence-stringing a curse and a trial, now suddenly we blistered under an unmoving sadistic sun. It was as if we’d been magically transported—house, weeds, garbage and all—from the windward coast of Scotland to the desert outside Tucson. One night the wind rattled up out of the south with the choking roar of an invading army—trucks in low gear, feet tramping across the roof—and in the morning it was clear. And dry. So dry that Phil’s pompadour went permanently limp and our bathtowels stiffened to the consistency of redwood bark. You could feel the change in your nostrils, in your throat; you could hear it in the dry, tortured groans of the house, see it in the shimmering air and wilting weeds and in the slow-wheeling helices of vultures riding the thermal currents. Ninety-five degrees, ninety-six, one-oh-two. Lizards appeared from nowhere, as if they’d been conjured from the air, hummingbirds hung like mobiles over the bells of flowers, streams fell back and left their banks exposed like toothless gums. Mud caked, dried, fragmented to dust. The arid season was upon us.

  We were ready for it. As ready as the reddest-necked cracker in the Imperial Valley, as ready as the Israelis on the Negev. Or so we thought. By May 31, when workers elsewhere were grilling hot dogs and singing “God Bless America,” we were putting the finishing touches to an elaborate irrigation system engineered by Vogelsang, approved by Dowst and realized (i.e., hauled, hammered, cut, glued, joined and bled over) by Phil, Gesh and me. The mainstay of this system was a used gasoline-powered water pump for which Vogelsang had paid $100 at a foreclosure sale. Theoretically, the pump would suck water from the year-round stream at the base of the mountain, force it through the camouflaged lengths of one-inch plastic pipe we’d laid and connected, and then push it all the way up the mountain’s five hundred fifty vertical feet and into the big horse-troughs situated above the Khyber Pass, our highest growing area. From there, the water would gravity-feed to smaller reservoirs consisting of clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums, and thence to the hand-held hoses from which we would provide each plant with the two to three gallons of water it needed daily.

  The first problem we encountered was a familiar one: noise. When all the pipe had been painted, laid and linked, and all the connections made to the reservoirs, we gathered at the base of the hill to fire up the pump and inaugurate the system. It was a ceremonial occasion, and we stood around clutching slippery cans of beer while Vogelsang bent to make minute adjustments to the gasoline feed, the filter, the carburetor. Mosquitoes whined, the stream slid over obstructions with a languid splash and trickle. I thought of railroad men come together for the driving of the final spike, or boutonniered politicians toasting the first explosive rush of water that flooded the Erie Canal.

  The day was hot, one of the first true scorchers we’d had, the sun raging through the trees like a forest fire. We were swallowed up in the clot of vegetation that lined the streambed, and it seemed as if the leaves caught and held the air until it reared up and slapped us in the face. Gesh was running sweat, his eyes slits, cheekbones glistening as if they’d been oiled; Phil’s clothes were soaked through; I could taste the salt on my lips. Only Vogelsang seemed oblivious to the heat. Dressed in goggles, gloves, surgeon’s mask and jumpsuit, and with a .44 magnum strapped incongruously round his waist, he had spent the better part of the morning creeping through the scrub to inspect each joint and coupling along the pipeline. Now, as he hunched over the pump with wrench and screwdriver, I was surprised to discover that not a single damp spot darkened the khaki jumpsuit. I was marveling over this revelation—he doesn’t even sweat, I thought in amazement—when he stood, brushed the knees of his pants and jerked the starter cord.

  Our cheers were drowned in the roar of the engine, which was at least six decibels louder than the one we’d abandoned outside the cabin. The beers popped soundlessly, blue-black coils of exhaust clutched at us before twisting off to darken the sky, the engine screamed its animate agony. Phil looked unhappy, Gesh gritted his teeth. If Vogelsang was disturbed, he gave no sign of it—he merely stood there, arms akimbo, staring down at the thing as if he were contemplating a painting in a gallery. Aorta never even turned her head. In shorts and halter top, she perched on a rock in midstream and serenely tapped her foot to a private rhythm, her ability to register auditory shock evidently impaired through her association with the Nostrils. Rat-a-rap-rap, screamed the engine, rap-rap-rap. Gesh bellowed something in my ear, but it was lost in the machine-gun rattle of the engine; I concentrated on swallowing without choking on my tongue. After five minutes or so, Vogelsang shut the thing down, then lifted his surgeon’s mask and turned to us. “You’ll have to dig a pit.”

  We dug. Four feet down in yellowish clay. Sweat flowing, mosquitoes harassing, beer gone sour in our throats. Then we set the pump in the trench, threw a slab of plywood over it and buried the muffler in sand. “That should do it,” Vogelsang said.

  As Gesh, Phil and I started up the hill, he turned the engine over again and I thought at first we were under attack, the fulminating blast of machinery so unexpected, so obscene and startling in the quiet of the woods. Phil shouted something to the effect that laboratory rats chewed off their own feet when subjected to loud and unremitting noise, but already the trees had begun to muffle the blare of the pump, taking the edge off it in the way a mute softens a trumpet. We would barely hear it from the house, I realized, but Gesh, who had long since identified Vogelsang as the enemy, wasn’t mollified. “Terrific,” he said, loping up the hill. “That’s about as subtle as the London blitz.”

  The second problem was more complicated, human rather than mechanical. The problem was Lloyd Sapers. According to legal agreement, Sapers had access to the central road bisecting our property and plunging down into the valley to the southeast. This was his fire road—his escape route in the event that the primary road was blocked by fire, no mean consideration in an area that grew progressively drier until at the end of the season the hills were as volatile as balls of newsprint soaked in gasoline.

  On the morning
after we’d broken in the irrigation system, Vogelsang, Aorta and I were gathered around the breakfast table while Phil and Gesh watered the Khyber Pass and Dowst huddled in the greenhouse, trying to perform horticultural miracles with a handful of withered seeds and a bucket of Nutri-Grow. Since his arrival two nights earlier—he’d come, reluctantly, to oversee the completion of the irrigation system—Vogelsang had been jumpy as an air-raid warden. Nervous about everything from poison oak to pot poachers to detection and arrest by the DEA, FBI, IRS and the Willits Sheriff’s Department, he was practically clonic, every facial muscle twitching, fingers drumming the tabletop, legs beating like pistons. In a word, he was wired.

  This was understandable. With a forest of eighteen-inch plants in the ground, we were all edgy—they had the goods on us now—but Phil, Gesh and I had come to grips with our fears. Or at least we tried to obliterate them through the abuse of drugs and alcohol and an unwavering commitment to the sustaining visions of Rio, Cajun seafood houses and fat bank accounts. We had no other choice: unlike Vogelsang, we had to live with the threat of exposure day in and day out. For well over a month, for that matter, I’d been living with the knowledge of what Savoy had said to me that night—everybody knows what you guys are doing up there—a festering little secret, hidden close. Before the words had passed her lips I was on my feet, pretending I hadn’t heard her, making apologies. I glanced at my watch, slapped my forehead, shrugged into my jacket and staggered out the door like a hamstrung deer. When I got back to the cabin, the lights were out. Just as well, I thought, inching my way through the darkness to my room, spun round with alcohol, panic and the finality of my decision. I was in this thing to the end: Give me pot, or give me death, I thought, giggling to myself. No teenager with an uplift bra and unsized eyes was going to scare me off it, nor Jerpbak, voodoo calendars or shotguns, either. I could take it, liberated by the pledge I’d made myself, burst from under the pall of the sickness unto death and into the light of faith. But why worry Phil and Gesh?