Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

  We pegged. Crawled on our hands and knees through the rattlesnake-, scorpion- and tarantula-infested brush, the sweat dripping from our noses, and hammered stakes into the ground, stretching our chicken wire so tight even a beetle couldn’t have crawled under it. It took us a week. Dowst stayed on to supervise, to potter around the growing areas exuding expertise, and even, on occasion, to lend a hand. When we got the whole thing finished—all the fences in all the growing areas nailed down tight—I observed that we were still losing plants to the mystery gnawers, and suggested that the big bundles of twigs and downed branches we regularly came across in the woods and had as a matter of course enclosed within the confines of our now impervious fences were in fact rats’ nests and that rats, not rabbits, were the culprits. Dowst demurred. But two days later, as the plants continued to wither and the toothy girdles to proliferate, he authorized Phil to drive into Santa Rosa and purchase two hundred rat traps at Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply.

  By now it was early August, nearly a month since my fateful scrape with the law. We had something like eight hundred and forty six-foot plants—bushes, trees—burgeoning around us. The boredom was crushing. We alternated early watering chores—two days on, one day off—so that each of us could sleep late two days a week. I almost preferred getting up early. At least you felt alive in the cool of the morning, traversing fields damp with dew, ducking through silent groves of oak and madrone, catching a glimpse of deer, fox, bobcat. We’d get back to the cabin at nine-thirty or ten, the temperature already past ninety, stuff something in our mouths and fall face forward on our worn mattresses. It would be one or two by the time we woke to the deadening heat, our nostrils parched, throats dry as dunes, and joined the late sleeper in the continuous round of drinking, pot smoking, cards, and horseshoes that would put us away, dead drunk and disoriented, in the wee hours of the morning.

  Each day was the same, without variation. Occasionally the pump would break down and Gesh would take it to a repairman in town and attempt to be casual about what he was doing with twenty-five-hundred gallons of water a day, or Dowst would pay a visit with magazines, newspapers, vodka and ice. But that was about it for excitement. The cards wore thin, the walls developed blisters from the intensity of our stares, we began to know the household lizards by name. “Gollee,” Phil would say, slipping into an Atchafalaya drawl as we sat silently over our fiftieth game of pitch, “I haven’t had this much fun since the hogs ate my baby sister.”

  If we saw Dowst once or twice a week, we rarely saw Vogelsang. As the plants blossomed into hard evidence, he made himself increasingly scarce, more than ever the silent partner. “Look, I’ve got too much to lose,” he told us one night after he’d been summoned to repair the kick start on the surviving Kawasaki. “I just can’t take the risk of being seen up here or identified in any way with this operation. I’ve got business interests, property in three states, a number of other deals in the works …” and he waved his hand to show the futility of trying even to intimate the scope of his interests. We watched that exasperated hand in silence, thinking our own thoughts about how much he had to lose, and by extension, how little we had. To lose.

  For my part, the euphoria of being allowed to stay on was quickly exhausted, and I’d come to feel as oppressed as my coworkers by the drudgery and the unvarying routine. During the long slow hours of the interminable sweltering afternoons, propped up in a chair with a tall vodka and tonic and some moronic sci-fi paperback Phil had picked up at a used-book store in Ukiah ("The classics, Phil,” I’d tell him, “get me something fat by Dostoevski or Dickens or somebody"), I began to feel I was aestivating, my clock wound down, brain numbed. It was then, more than ever, that I would find myself thinking of Petra.

  One evening, while we stood round the horseshoe pit, winning, losing and exchanging chits, Dowst’s van slid through the trees along the road and swung into the field, jouncing toward us across the brittle yellow expanse of the yard like a USO wagon come to some remote outpost. We were shirtless, bearded, dirty, our jeans sun-bleached and boots cracked with age and abuse. Behind us the sun flared in the sky, fat and red as a tangerine, and a host of turkey vultures, naked heads, glossy wings, converged on the carcass of some luckless creature struck down behind the shed. Puddles of crushed glass glinted at our feet, the sagging out-buildings eased toward the ground like derelicts bedding down for the night, and the cabin, pale as driftwood, radiated heat in scalloped waves until you had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t on fire. For an instant I saw the scene from Dowst’s eyes—from the eyes of an outsider, an emissary from the world of hot tubs and Cuisinarts—and realized that we must have looked like mad prospectors, like desert rats, like the sad sun-crazed remnants of Pizarro’s band on the last leg of the road to Eldorado.

  Dowst backed out of the van, crablike, his arms laden, and disappeared into the house. A moment later he emerged, newspaper in hand, and crossed the yard to join us. He was wearing white shorts and an alligator-emblazoned shirt, tennis shoes and pink-tinted shades. “Hi,” he said, gangling and affable, as relaxed as a man who’s just played two sets of tennis before brunch, and then held out the newspaper as if it were a new steel racket or a Frisbee. “I thought you guys might want to see this.”

  See what? VOGELSANG ELECTED MAYOR; POT SOARS ON COMMODITIES MARKET; JERPBAK TRANSFERRED TO JERUSALEM. We saw the front page of the Chronicle, blocks of print, a murky photograph. Puzzled, we crowded round him, scanning the headlines, passing quickly over the stories of corruption in government, poverty in the Third World and carnage in the Seychelles, until the following story leapt out from the page to seize us like the iron grip of a strangler:

  WAR DECLARED ON POT GROWERS

  The Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department of Justice have formulated plans for a federally funded assault on growers of high-grade sinsemilla marijuana along the Northern California coast, the Chronicle learned today. A federal law-enforcement grant of $400,000 has been rushed through to enable the newly formed “Sinsemilla Strike Force” to begin operations before the fall harvest season. The strike force will coordinate federal agents and local police departments in “sniffing out illicit growing operations,” as one source put it, in Mendocino, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties. Aerial surveillance, including the use of infra-red photography, will, it is hoped, pinpoint the locations of so many of the large-scale farms, while a program of special cash rewards for turning in growers is expected to help in exposing others.

  “People are tired of this sort of thing,” a source close to the strike force said, “and they resent the outsiders that come into their community for illegal and often highly lucrative purposes. We’re confident that the reward system will make it easier for local residents to help us identify and apprehend the criminals in their midst.”

  Operations could begin as early as next month, the source disclosed.

  Dowst was grinning sheepishly, a slight flush to his cheeks, as if he’d just told an off-color joke at a lawn party. “Not such great news, huh?”

  For some reason, the story didn’t affect me as it would have a few months earlier. I was alarmed, certainly, all the vital functions thrown into high gear as I read on, but I wasn’t panicked. In fact, relatively speaking, I was calm. Perhaps my run-in with Jerpbak and the little scene I’d gone through with Savoy—everybody knows what you guys are doing up there—had made me fatalistic. Perhaps I expected a bust. Perhaps I wanted it.

  Gesh was not quite so calm. He snatched the paper from Dowst’s hands, balled it up and attempted to punt it into the trees. Then he turned on him, his face splayed with anger. “What next?” he shouted, as if Dowst were to blame. “Christ!” he roared, and spun round to face the empty hills.

  Phil was pale. He tried to laugh it off, improvising a halfhearted joke about infra-red pot and reading glasses for the eye in the sky, until his words trailed off in a little self-conscious bleat of laughter.

  Then, in what had almost become a reflex gestu
re for him, Gesh wheeled around to jab a thick admonitory finger in Dowst’s face. “Between the rats and the bears and you and Vogelsang and now the fucking federal government, there’s going to be precious little of this pot to split up, you know that?”

  Dowst knew it. And so did we.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The following day, after he’d made a tour of the plantation and monitored the growth of each leaf, stem and twig, Dowst announced that he’d begun sexing the plants and that within a month all the males should have emerged. “Around the end of September, after the photoperiod begins to decline; that’s when we’ll get them all.”

  Phil and I were playing checkers; Gesh was dozing on the couch, a newspaper spread over his face. It was mid-afternoon, and the heat was like a wasting disease. “Huh?” I said.

  “You know,” Dowst was rattling through the cans of soup in the cupboard under the sink, “for sinsemilla pot. We’ve got to weed out the male plants.”

  That was something we’d known all along, in the way we knew that chickens laid eggs whether there was a rooster or not, or that Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system—it was part of our general store of knowledge. But we hadn’t really stopped to think about it, to consider its ramifications or work it into our formulae for translating plants into dollars. Any fool knew that in order to get sinsemilla pot you had to identify and eliminate the male plants so that the energy of the unfertilized females would go toward production of the huge, resinous, THC-packed colas that made seedless pot the most potent, desirable and highly priced smoke on the market. Any fool. But to this point we’d conveniently managed to overlook it.

  I watched Phil’s face as the realization of what Dowst was saying seeped into his nervous system and gave vent to various autonomous twitches of mortification and regret. “You mean … we’ve got to … to … throw out some of the plants?”

  Dowst had found a can of Bon Ton lobster bisque and was applying the opener to it. “Usually about fifty percent. It could be higher or lower. Depending.”

  Phil looked like a man being strapped into the electric chair while his wife French-kisses the D.A. in the hallway. “On what?”

  The lobster bisque was the color of diarrhea. Dowst sloshed it into his spotless Swiss aluminum camp pot and stirred it with a spoon he’d carefully disinfected over the front burner. “Luck,” he said finally, and he pronounced the word as if it had meaning, pronounced it like the well-washed Yankee optimist he was, a man who could trace his roots back to the redoubtable Dowsts on the Mayflower. Besides, he had his van, a condo in Sausalito and a monthly stipend from his trust fund. He didn’t need luck.

  I thought of Mendel’s pea plants, x and y chromosomes, thought of all those hale and hearty many-branching glorious male plants that would be hacked down and burned—fifty percent of the crop in a single swoop and the second such swoop in a month’s time. Numbers invaded my head like an alien force, a little problem in elementary arithmetic: Take 840 pot plants and divide by 2. Divide again, allowing for one-half pound of marketable pot per plant, to solve for the total number of pounds obtained. Multiply this figure by $1600, the going rate per pound. Now divide by 3 to arrive at the dollar value of each share—the financiers, the expert’s and the yeomen’s—and finally divide by 3 again to find the miserable pittance that you yourself will receive after nine months of backbreaking labor, police terror and exile from civilization.

  Dowst was whistling. Phil gnawed at the edge of a black plastic checker, expressionless, his eyes vacant. My half million had been reduced to $37,000. Barring seizure, blight, insect depredation and unforeseeable natural disasters, that is. It was a shock. If Jerpbak, ravenous rodents and the “Sinsemilla Strike Force” had driven a stake through my heart, Dowst had just climbed atop the coffin to nail down the lid.

  I awoke the following morning to the tortured rasping of the pickup’s starter and the hacking cough of combustion that eventually succeeded it. Bleary, disoriented—what time was it, anyway? Five-thirty? Six?—I rolled out of bed and trundled up the hallway and into the front room, where I stood in my underwear and peered groggily out the window. The pickup sat motionless in the high weeds, a coil of shadowy exhaust winding from the tailpipe as I watched with a vague, unformed curiosity, emerging from dreams as from a lake. Then a dull tooth of light glinted from the pickup’s windshield as the vehicle heaved forward and rocked across the tarnished field, tailgate clanking, stiff grass giving way, birds bitching in the trees: there was the valediction of the brake lights, and it was gone. I stood there a moment longer, perplexed, scratching at my privates, until a voice spoke at me from the gloom of the far corner. “Gesh and Phil,” the voice said.

  Dowst, I saw now, was sitting at the kitchen table over a bowl of granola, shaking vitamin tablets into his palm from a forest of plastic vials. A soft, aqueous light suffused the room, pressing like a swollen balloon against the familiar objects of the place, softening corners, spreading shadows.

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “Five.”

  Five. I let that register, still scratching, then allowed my awakening mind to seize on the next question. “Where are they going?”

  Dowst sighed. His eyes, pale in the best of light, were rinsed of color in the incipient gray of the morning. “Tahoe,” he said.

  “Tahoe?”

  “For three days. R and R, they said. Both of them said they couldn’t sleep.”

  Little wonder, I thought, after the cheering news of the past few weeks (slash, hack, another integer bites the dust). It was my turn to sigh. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down across from Dowst.

  So they were gone. Disheartened, disillusioned, shorn of hope, spirit and animation, heads bowed, tails between their legs, the oyster bar reduced to a burger counter, the yacht to a dinghy. For one disjointed instant I wondered if I’d ever see them again, wondered if they’d decided to bag it, write the whole thing off and go back to the lost world of prawns, Mai Tais and teriyaki. But then, as I considered it, certitude came over me in a rush, and I knew—categorically and beyond the shadow of a doubt—that they would be back. Of course they would. A hundred and sixty thousand, eighty thousand, forty, twenty—what difference did it make? It was all they had. They needed this thing as badly as I did—if it failed, after all the hope and sweat and toil we’d invested in it, then the society itself was bankrupt, the pioneers a fraud, true grit, enterprise and daring as vestigial as adenoids or appendixes. We believed in Ragged Dick, P. T. Barnum, Diamond Jim Brady, in Andrew Carnegie, D. B. Cooper, Jackie Robinson. In the classless society, upward mobility, the law of the jungle. We’d seen all the movies, read all the books. We never doubted that we would make it, that one day we would be the fat cats in the mansion on the hill. Never. Not for a moment. After all, what else was there?

  Dowst and I did the morning watering; then I went back to bed. When I woke about noon, bathed in sweat, Dowst was perched on the edge of the couch, his duffel bag packed, leafing through an issue of Fremontia. “Listen,” he said, “I wonder if you could handle the watering by yourself tonight. I’m supposed to meet this friend of mine in the botany department at Berkeley—we’re going to have drinks and dinner in Santa Rosa. It’s really important. I could wind up with a two-year appointment there if things work out.”

  I was being deserted for the second time that day. I was hot, disappointed, lonely, restless and beset with vague fears. I shrugged.

  “Because I’d really appreciate it,” Dowst said, getting to his feet. “I mean, uh, I’ll probably be back late tonight—no, I’ll definitely be back tonight—so I can help you with the morning watering. And for the next couple of days, too—until those guys get back.”

  I nodded wearily, and he was gone. I listened to the smooth rumble of the van’s engine until the sound was swallowed up in the rattle of insects and the harsh glottal complaint of a crow perched outside the door. The house blistered around me. I heard a shingle crack, watched a lizard emerge from
a rent in the wall and disappear behind the couch. It was then that it seized me. An idea, a point of perspective, an exhilarating, lubricious, uninhibited foretaste of forbidden fruit. I was alone. I could do anything I wanted—anything—and no one would be the wiser.

  But no. I’d given my word. Jerpbak lay in wait for me out there, the Sinsemilla Strike Force was poised to strike. Besides, I couldn’t leave the place unguarded—what if Sapers came nosing around? Or if some hiker or cowboy blundered across our sweet fields of money trees? No, I couldn’t leave the place, I couldn’t.

  Thirty seconds later I was in the bedroom, poking through the mound of clothes in the corner and sniffing socks and T-shirts to discover the least offensive. It’s been over a month, I was thinking as I dug the dirt from beneath my nails with the blade of a pocketknife. From somewhere below, the crow let out a long rasping laugh and then flapped past the window like a knot of rags. My twice-brushed teeth gleamed at me in the mirror, my eyes were feverish. I eased down on the edge of the bed and pulled on a pair of white jeans, lamentably stained in the crotch with a blot of red wine but otherwise presentable, and then spit-polished my Dingo boots. Over a month. She wouldn’t even remember me. I held the keys in my hand. Would she?

  Chapter 6

  The shop bell made a prim, little-girl-peeing sort of sound, the sun blasted the back of my head, a smell of sweet herbs and the music of the spheres enveloped me, and I shut the door on a cool, leafy potter’s paradise. Outside, the streets were like furnaces, dust, glare, hot tires on hot pavement; here was the peace of a pine forest, soft-lit from the skylights above, suffused with the sweet scent of the sachets that clung to the beams like cocoons, viridescent with plants spilling from hanging pots, reaching for the ceiling from ceramic floor planters, sending tendrils out to embrace the weathered barn siding that silvered the walls. I stood there a moment, my back to the door, catching my breath like a man emerging from the sauna to plunge into a cold bath. Gentle breezes wafted, hidden speakers filled the room with a chorus of voices that rose and fell in passionate certitude—Bach, wasn’t it? Yes, J. S. Bach sending a glorious full-throated missive to a merciful and present God.