Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

  “We went. She took me home with her—she had money, a ground-floor apartment in Manhattan Beach with a little patio and cactuses that must have cost five hundred bucks apiece. Next day we went out to lunch. We went to the zoo, saw a band at the Whisky. Then two days later she called and asked me did I want to go out on her father’s sailboat. Sure, I said, why not?”

  Phil said he’d been sailing exactly three times in his life, twice on lakes and once on Long Island Sound. All three times he’d ended up in the water.

  Gesh lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “That’s about as much experience as I’d had, too, fooling around in lakes and coves in those little fourteen-foot jobs, Sunfish or whatever you call them. But this boat was big, thirty-five feet or so, bobbing in the water at Marina del Rey like a big white coffin. … I mean it had bunks and a galley with this little stove and refrigerator, Stolichnaya in the freezer, teakwood decks, the works. It was called The Christina Rossetti—after some poet her mother’d studied in college, Denise said.

  “She said she knew what she was doing, but we had a lot of trouble just getting the sails up and making it out of the marina without hitting anything. But after that, with the whole wide blue sea out there, it was easy. The boat ran itself. Every once in a while the sail would come round and Denise’d tell me to haul on this line or that, but it was no big deal—it wasn’t like we were going anywhere or anything. Shit, I began to enjoy myself. The sun was flaring away, there was a nice breeze blowing, Denise looked edible in this black bikini. I mixed us some cocktails and slipped my hand in her pants. We did it right there, standing up, her holding onto the wheel, the boat rocking, seagulls flapping by. It was fantastic, like being on an island or something—nobody around for miles. There was no reason to put our suits back on.”

  Gesh looked up at me. “Sounds great, huh Felix? Paradise on earth, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’ve got a feeling this is where it turns nasty.”

  “Nasty? That doesn’t even come close, man—this was fucking horrifying. One minute I’m getting laid and sipping a martini, the next I’m in the water. What happens is the wind comes up all of a sudden while we’re lying there on the deck, stroking each other and getting hot to do it again. I’ve got a hard-on like a steel rod and I lift myself up to stick it in her when the boomline breaks and this fucking pole comes slamming around and catches me under the chin. Next thing I know I’m in the water—the ocean. Miles from shore. I can’t even fucking swim that good, and I’ll tell you”—he was holding my eyes—“snakes may be your thing, but mine is sharks. I’m scared shitless of them. I don’t even go in over my head at the beach because I’m afraid some saw-toothed monster is going to rip my legs off. Really, I don’t care how I go, just so long as I don’t wind up as shark shit.”

  I watched as Gesh extracted rolling papers and an envelope of pot from the pocket of his dungaree jacket. He rolled a joint thin as a Tootsie Pop stick and passed it to me. I lit it, took a drag, and passed it back.

  “So anyway, Denise jumps up and starts wringing her hands and screaming and whatnot, and then runs back to the wheel and tries to swing the boat around. Meanwhile, I’m churning up the waves like Mark Spitz—it’s amazing what you can do when you have to—and the boat is drifting away. Drifting? I mean it was flying, really moving out, sails humming and everything. I wasn’t in the water ten seconds and it was already fifty yards away. Then it was a hundred yards, two hundred, and then it was gone.

  “Christ. I was in an absolute panic. For about the next ten minutes I swam for all I was worth, the chop of the waves crowding me in, gulping water, stopping every few seconds to kick myself up as high as I could and try and see something. Water, that’s all I saw. No land, no boat. Nothing. It was cold. There was salt in my eyes. It was then, completely by accident, that I blundered into a life preserver—The Christina Rossetti, it said in big red letters. I felt like I’d been saved, right then and there. I hooted for joy, heaved myself up on the thing and waved my arms. She’ll be back any minute, I thought, soon as she gets the goddamned boat under control. She’ll be back, she’s got to be.

  “I was in the water for six hours. Shivering, praying, scared full of adrenaline. I kept making deals with the Fates, with God, Neptune, whoever, thinking I’d trade places with anybody, anywhere—lepers, untouchables, political prisoners, Idi Amin’s wives—anything, so long as I’d be alive. I remember I kept looking down to where my feet disappeared in the murk, feeling like they were separated from my body or something, sure that at any moment they’d be jerked out from under me. I thought about Jaws and Blue Water, White Death. Thought about the guy who got hit by a white shark off the Farallons and was dragged down about a hundred feet by the impact and said the happiest moment of his life was when he felt his leg give at the knee.”

  The joint had gone dead in Gesh’s fingers. He was staring down at the floor and seeing waves, his face sober with the memory of it, nobody laughing now. I wondered why he was telling us this, what the point of the exercise was. At first I thought he’d been boasting, letting us know how tough he was, how hip and cynical and experienced with the ladies. But now, looking at the way his face had gone cold, I realized that wasn’t it at all.

  Phil got up with a snap of his knees and fed a bundle of pine branches into the stove. There was a fierce crackling and an explosion of sparks as he slammed the door and eased back down on the blistered linoleum. “So come on,” he prodded, “don’t keep us in suspense—finish the story.”

  I made some noises of encouragement and Gesh relit the joint.

  “I spotted seven boats that day,” he said, shaking out the match, “and I shouted my lungs out, tried to throw the fucking life preserver up in the air—anything. But nobody saw me. That was the worst. You’d get your hopes up, thinking, I’m going to make it, I’m going to live, and you’d start paddling for the boat, screaming like a wounded rabbit, and they’d just coast right by as if you didn’t exist, as if you were dead already. Then the sun went down. If they couldn’t see me in the light of day, what chance was there they’d spot me in the dark? None, zip, zero. I began to cry—the first time I’d cried since I was a kid. There was a hole inside of me. I was shivering nonstop, like a machine about to break down. I was dead.

  “Then, just after the moon rose, this gigantic cabin cruiser—fifty feet long at least—comes cutting across the waves straight for me. It was lit up like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime, they were having a party. I could see them, gray heads, cocktail glasses, two women in low-cut dresses. ’Help!’ I scream. ’Help!’ The engine was chugging away, waves slapping the bow: they couldn’t hear me. I fought my way toward the point where I thought the boat would pass and tried once more, screaming till my throat gave out. Then, like a miracle, like statues bleeding and the dead coming to life, one of the gray heads turned. ’Here!’ I shouted. One woman touched the other’s arm and pointed.”

  Gesh’s voice had quavered. He sat in silence for a moment, running the tip of his tongue over his upper lip and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “They didn’t even have the radio on,” he said, waving his palm in frustration, “they didn’t even know I was out there. Luck is all it was. Blind luck. I came on board naked, racked with shivers, two miles off Palos Verdes in the most shark-infested waters on the southern coast. One of the men aboard is a doctor. He tells me I’m suffering from hypothermia and makes me get into this down jacket, wraps me in blankets and gives me hot pea soup. Which I hate.

  “When we get back, Denise is waiting on the pier along with a bunch of news reporters and guys in Coast Guard uniform. She’s barefoot, still in her bathing suit, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. I don’t know what came over me—I should have been filled with joy, right, glad to be alive and all that—but when I saw her there looking like the distraught heroine I just thought, You stupid bitch. You worthless piece of shit. Somebody was snapping pictures, flashbulbs bursting, she was running down t
he planks with her arms outstretched like it was the end of a movie or something, and I just couldn’t take it. I gave her a stiff arm like Earl Campbell—caught her right in the breastbone—and sent her sprawling over the edge of the dock, ten feet down, into the blackness. There was a scream and a splash, and suddenly everybody cleared a path for me.”

  That was it. Finis. Gesh sat there, big and rumpled, something like a smile of satisfaction tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t believe it,” Phil said. “You really pushed her in?”

  Gesh looked as self-righteous as a fundamentalist at a book burning. He drained his glass and flashed us a grin. “Bet your ass I did.”

  Phil started it, with a snicker that gave way to a bray. Then I joined in, counterpoint, and finally Gesh, three-part harmony. We were drunk. We were alive. And for the second time that day, we were laughing. We laughed impetuously, immoderately, irreverently, wiping tears from our eyes. Late into the night.

  Chapter 3

  “All right. You won’t actually need to know about this for another two weeks or so, but you may as well get an idea right now.” Dowst leaned on the haft of his shovel, patting at his face with a red bandanna. Behind him, banks of mist obscured a sick pale sun, light spread across the horizon like putty. At his feet, a hole. Raw yellow earth, gouged out like a boil or canker sore. “You want to go down about two, two and a half feet, and make it wide around as a garbage can lid.” Suddenly he was grunting or wheezing in the oddest way, like a horse with a progressive lung disease. It took me a minute before I realized what it was: he was laughing. “Or a”—he wheezed again—“or a big cut-glass punchbowl.”

  It was a joke. Phil, Gesh and I glanced at one another. Ha-ha.

  We were standing over the hole, our breath steaming in the cold damp air, watching Dowst like Botany 101 students on a field trip. It was seven a.m. Gesh was wearing a black turtleneck maculated with grease stains (the result of a breakfast mishap), Phil was hunched in the carapace of a paint-spattered K-Mart sweatshirt, and I was sporting one of the flannel shirts I’d bought for the country, now torn and dirtied beyond recognition. Dowst was wearing eighty-dollar hiking boots, pressed jeans and the yellow rain slicker he’d had on the night I met him. “This,” he said finally, “is the model hole. Once you get the fences up you’re going to have to dig two thousand of them.”

  Gesh had a cold. He dredged the mucus from his throat and spat noisily. “While you’re sitting on your ass in Sausalito, right?”

  “No, no, no, no, no—I’ll be right here the next three or four days at least, working side by side with you. We’ve got to get those fences up and start the seedlings before we get too far behind schedule.”

  “And Vogelsang?”

  Dowst tucked the bandanna in his pocket and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “He said he’d be up tomorrow.”

  “Shit.” Gesh focused on a fist-sized stone and hammered it against the side of the house with a vicious swipe of his boot. “That’s what he said a week and a half ago.”

  Dowst had showed up at dusk the previous evening—eight days after the appointed time. For a week and a half we’d been on our own, isolated, bewildered, putting in twelve-hour days with the come-along and then collapsing on our soiled mattresses at night. Once the initial hillside had been fenced (we called it the Khyber Pass in tribute to its vertiginous goat-walks and sheer declivities), we erected a greenhouse to specifications Dowst had given us in Bolinas. It was a joy compared to fencing. I took charge, relieved to be doing something I was familiar with, and we threw up the framework in an afternoon. Then we nailed Visquine—clear sheets of plastic—over the waterlogged studs and painted the whole thing green, khaki and dirt brown: army camouflage. “I feel like we’re going to war,” Phil said over the hiss of his spray can. His right hand and the sleeve of the jacket from which it protruded were a slick uniform jungle green, owing to a sudden wind shift. Gesh stood beside him, his arm rotating in a great whirling arc, spewing paint like smoke. His jaw was set, he was squinting against the fading light. “Damn straight,” he grunted.

  Then we began to get itchy. Neither Dowst nor Vogelsang had showed up and we had no further instructions. And yet Dowst had repeatedly impressed upon us the vital necessity of keeping on schedule. The plants had to attain their optimum growth by September 22, when the photoperiod began to decrease. Once the daily quotient of sunlight was superseded by a greater period of darkness, the plants automatically began to bud—it was built into their genes—and that was that. The later you got your seedlings into the ground, the smaller your plants would be when the autumnal equinox rolled around—and the smaller the plants, the smaller the harvest. You didn’t have to be a botanist to appreciate how all this smallness would relate to net profit.

  “So what do we do?” I asked. We were inside now, sipping at the evening’s first cocktail. We’d just driven the final nail into the greenhouse, the moon was up and the birds were crouched in the trees, grumbling like revolutionaries. “Just sit around?”

  Gesh was in the kitchen, rattling pans and slamming drawers. “Mr. Yale is fucking up on us already,” he said, swinging round and slapping a blackened pot of ravioli on the table. “How could we ever be so stupid as to trust somebody with a name like Boyd Dowst?”

  We’d put in a tough day in damp, forty-degree weather. The fire was warm, the smell of food distracted us, canned ravioli, boiled potatoes and pale yellow wax beans had appeared on our plates. There was coffee, orange juice and something that resembled a foot-square brownie. Outside, the hiss of wind and a spatter of rain. We ate in silence, our eyes gone soft with the first chemical rush of hunger gratified, facial muscles swelling and contracting, saliva flowing, throats clenching and stomachs revolving in mindless subjection to the alimentary imperative: chew, swallow, digest. I listened to the scrape of utensils on the tin plates, glanced at our beards, our tattered clothes, the ramshackle roof that sagged over us, and thought how apt Phil’s military metaphor had been—we were like irregulars, some cadre of the People’s Army holding the line in a remote outpost, guerrillas taking refuge in the mountains. Of course the metaphor had its limits—we were capitalist guerrillas, after all.

  “We could use a day off,” Phil said after a while. “We can’t do anything without Dowst and Vogelsang. I mean, what do we know about plants anyway? Christ, I never even had a wandering Jew.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “No? What are we supposed to do then—fence in the whole three hundred and ninety acres? I say we take tomorrow off and just lay up and rest—or maybe go into town, see what kind of nightlife Willits has to offer.”

  Gesh was shaking his head. “Uh-uh, Felix is right. Look, I’m not up here for my health—I’m going to bust my ass, tear my hair out, do everything I fucking can to make sure I see that hundred and sixty-six thousand come November—and I say we pick out another growing area on our own.”

  Next morning we took the come-along and went looking.

  It was a good move psychologically. We were riding the crest of accomplishment, the dreariness and hardship of the first week behind us, one area already fenced and the greenhouse erected, and now, when we had every excuse to sit back and wait for instructions, we were seizing the initiative. Here we were, men of action, hard, tough, ready for anything, off to wrest a million and a half dollars from the earth. But where to begin? There was an awful lot of territory out there: trees uncountable, rocks, slopes, sheer deadly drops, gaping gulleys, hardpan flats that mocked pick or shovel, thickets of thorn and manzanita as close and sharp as teeth. “What we need,” I said, lacing my sneakers, “is something hidden, level and not too far from the house.” We were milling around the front yard, belching softly over breakfast. “Good luck,” Phil said.

  The property sloped sharply toward the dirt road that linked us (however tenuously) with the outside world, and then dropped off beyond it to the south and east. To the north was Sapers’s house, inconveniently located at the extrem
ity of his property, no more than two hundred yards across the ravine from ours. (We couldn’t believe it—the two places combined must have been close to a thousand acres, and yet the houses were within shouting distance. Wagon-train mentality, Phil called it, his voice saturated with disgust.) To the west, the mountain we were situated on rose another two hundred vertical feet before petering out in a smooth bald crown of rock. Since we wanted southern exposure—that much we knew at least—we started down a crude ancillary road that looped away from our driveway and wound round the southern slope like a waistband.

  You didn’t have to be Natty Bumppo to see that the road had been in disuse for some time. Branches had begun to close over it, saplings sprouted in the hollows dug by ancient wheels, clumps of poison oak made forays into the shoulders. There was evidence of animal life, too, most notably mounds of excrement flecked with seeds and bits of nutshell. I stopped at one point to tie my shoelace, and when I caught up with my co-workers they were bent over a glistening coil of feces that had been deposited smack in the center of the road. “Dog shit,” Gesh announced.

  “There aren’t any dogs up here,” Phil said. “I bet it’s raccoon shit.”

  “What about coyotes?”

  “Whatever it is, it looks pretty big,” I said.

  Gesh was racking his brain, mentally thumbing through the pages of some old battered Fieldbook and Guide to the Mammals of the Pacific Northwest. “Bear shit?”