Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  By the time we reached Santa Rosa the sky was the color of dishwater and sunk so low I had to turn the lights on. At Cloverdale, just below the Mendocino County line and fifty miles or so from Willits, our point of reference, it began to rain. Not with a burst of lightning or a roll of thunder, but with the sudden crashing fall characteristic of coastal precipitation.

  The hammering on the roof woke Gesh. He said he felt like shit. “Raw and unadulterated,” he added, slitting a cellophane Mandrax packet with his teeth. “How about we stop for a cup of coffee and wait till it clears?”

  We watched the water heave down the windows of the Hopland Coffee Shoppe in big scalloped sheets. It was so dark it could have been dusk shading into night. Phil was soaked through—apparently the truck’s window wouldn’t roll up. “Just my luck,” he said gloomily, and asked Gesh for some pharmaceutical help. Gesh, who seemed to have an unlimited supply, slipped him three Quaaludes. I took two. For equilibrium. It was ten-thirty in the morning. We waited until the waitress stopped refilling our coffee cups, shrugged our shoulders and hunched out into the rain.

  Willits, the rain-blurred sign announced some fifty minutes later, had a population of 4,120 and stood at an elevation of 1,377 feet. We passed a series of diners, motels and gas stations, Al’s Redwood Room, and a Safeway market. The town seemed contained in a single strip, stretched out along Highway 101 for the convenience of tourists intent on the redwood forests to the north. It was as bleak and barren and uninspiring as an iceberg bobbing in the Bering Sea. Gesh and I caught glimpses of it through the beating windshield wipers. “For the next nine months,” I said, a trace of retardation in my voice as a result of the drug, which shifts your system down a couple of gears into a sort of prehibernatory torpor, “this is our closest urban center.”

  “Urban center,” Gesh repeated, his voice as lugubrious as a noseblow. “Shee-it.”

  Fifteen miles north of Willits we were to turn off on a blacktop road, follow it past a place called Shirelle’s Bum Steer and six or seven tumbledown farms, and then up a gravel drive to a gate that opened on “five point three miles of unimproved dirt road,” to quote Vogelsang’s directions. Fine. But it was raining so hard we missed the turnoff and Phil nearly slammed into my tail end when I braked to cut a U-turn. I rattled up on the shoulder, hit the emergency flasher and ran back to confer with him.

  The intensity of the rain was staggering: I felt I was carrying a sack of potatoes on my back as I jogged the twenty steps to the pickup and poked my head through the open window. Rain tore at the back of my neck and sent exploratory tributaries down the collar of my jacket. A lone logging truck hissed up the highway, spewing water, and vanished in the haze. “What’s the story?” Phil mumbled, each word played out on a string like a yo-yo winding down. The sagging pompadour was flattened across his forehead and a drop of water depended from his nose.

  “Vogelsang said fifteen miles from Willits. I read fifteen and a half on my odometer. The road we just passed must be it.”

  Phil was shivering. The iris of his wild eye looked like an ice crystal in a cocktail glass. “Christ,” he moaned, “I hope so. All’s I want to do now is sit in front of the fire and crash for a couple hours.”

  Shirelle’s Bum Steer greeted us like a shout of affirmation as we lurched across the highway and onto the presumptive road. I could hear Phil honking his joy behind me as we sped past the place—a ramshackle country bar attached to a house in need of paint. A pair of mud-streaked pickups huddled beneath the drooling oak out front, the hand-lettered sign was pitched at a drunken angle, and a single sad Coors neon glowed in the window like a candle at the shrine of a martyr. I took it in at a glance, noting bleakly that this was our nearest outpost of civilization. “The Land of the Rednecks,” Gesh muttered, and added that he felt like Lewis of Lewis and Clark, or maybe it was Clark, and then we were rattling over a raging tributary of the Eel River (in summer it would subside to a series of fetid, mosquito-breeding pools) and threading our way up a valley between cropped, long-faced hills that bristled with pine like so many unshaven cheeks. We were counting off tumbledown farms and scouring the left-hand side of the road for a block of stone that protruded from the ground like an admonitory finger—our indication to swing into the next road to our right—when Gesh shouted “Eureka!” and I cut hard into a dirt road that was co-incidentally the brown rippling bed of a stream.

  Suddenly we were going uphill—climbing a precipice—the tires groping for purchase, water slashing at the fenders, the engine cranking with a propulsive whine and carrying us fifty or sixty feet in a headlong rush before the wheels sank to the hubcaps in a sea of reddish mud. Phil, loaded down with the barbed wire and Kawasakis, was able to develop better traction, and careened wildly up the hill and into the back of the stalled Toyota. I don’t recall the sound effects, whether there was a crunch, a shriek or a thud. But my head flew forward as if on an urgent journey of its own, the windshield groaned and then flowered in silver filigree, and the trunk latch popped open, forever. I looked at Gesh. He was cursing, and there was blood on his forearm.

  Then we were all out in the downpour, ankle-deep in mud and roiling water. Trees loomed over us like cupped black hands, the rain lashed our faces with a thousand stings, I rubbed my forehead and discovered that an object the size and consistency of a golf ball had been inserted beneath the skin in the vicinity of my left eyebrow. For a moment we just stood there, hunched like lost souls awaiting the ferry across the river of lamentation, cursing softly. Then Gesh plunged into the undergrowth like an enraged bull, tearing at ferns and briars and poison oak, knocking down saplings, uprooting stumps. I thought he’d gone mad.

  Meanwhile, Phil had begun to dance around the road, wringing his hands and rotating his head as if he were trying out an esoteric new routine for Alvin Ailey. “Hey, I didn’t know—“ he began, but I waved him off. “I’m okay,” I said, noting at the same time and with the dispassion of a man in a movie theater watching the Lusitania go down, that my duffel bag had been thrown from the trunk and into the center of the streambed. The heavy khaki cloth had gone dark with wet, and debris had already begun to collect against it. Inside were my shirts, my socks, my underwear, my sweaters. I took hold of the dripping strap and jerked the bag up out of the mud, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process. Phil helped me heave the sodden thing back into the trunk, and together we managed to secure the ruptured latch with a piece of wire.

  Suddenly Gesh emerged from the woods, his face cross-hatched with welts and contusions, the trench coat flapping about his knees. He was dragging a downed tree the size of a battering ram. For a moment we just stood there gaping at him, our hands at our sides, rain crashing through the trees, mud swirling at our feet. It was as if we’d just been wakened from a dream of sleeping. “Christ ass,” Gesh shouted, “give me a hand, will you?”

  I could feel the drug loosen its grip—think of a crouton drawn from a pot of fondue—and then I was at Gesh’s side, jerking furiously at the wet, moss-covered log. Phil fell in beside me, and we maneuvered the thing alongside the car, then staggered into the undergrowth for another. We worked silently, grunting at one another, each locked in his own thoughts (I was thinking of hot showers, hot soup, electric blankets and thermal underwear). Everything dripped, thorns raked at our wrists and faces, sowbugs crept up our arms, rain hissed in the branches like a stadium packed with disgruntled fans. As Phil and I wrestled with a half-petrified log, Gesh jacked the Toyota out of the mud. “All right, push!” he exhorted, the jack at its apogee, and the three of us leaned into the fender and then jumped back as the car slammed down on the makeshift platform with a percussive splintering crack. Then we jacked up the other side.

  There was a smell of slow rot on the air, of mold and compost. Birds mocked us from the trees. Our hands and faces were black with loam, as if we’d been buried and unearthed and buried again. Gesh tried to light a cigarette. His pants were torn at the knee and the trench coat hung from him like a
wet beach towel. Phil was clowning. He bent to scoop up a handful of mud and slap it down across the crown of his head, like Stan Laurel at the conclusion of a pie-throwing skirmish. It wasn’t funny. “Okay,” Gesh growled, flinging down the wet cigarette and spreading his big hands across the indented bumper of the Toyota, “why don’t you see what you can do?”

  I wiped my hands on the seat of my pants and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was musty and cold, the windows opaque with wet. I turned the key, took note of the answering roar (we’d lost the muffler apparently), and watched the wipers flail at the rain. Then I revved the engine, peeled the bark from the logs and hydroplaned up the road as far as I could go, my co-workers slogging madly behind me like refugees chasing after the Red Cross wagon. When I bogged down, the whole process started over again: heave, haul, crank, shove. Sometimes I’d manage to make a couple hundred feet; other times I’d come wheeling off the log grid and sink instantaneously in the mud. The rain was no help: it fell steadily all afternoon. And we were, as I was later to discover, climbing a vertical drop of something like six hundred feet from the blacktop road to the cabin.

  Finally, after four and a half back-breaking hours, we reached a point at which the road began to level out, and when I came off the launching pad for what must have been the twentieth time, I kept going. The car fishtailed right and left, low-hanging branches swooped at the windshield, the cheers of my partners faded in the background, and I kept going. There was a short straightaway, a series of S curves and then a wide sweeping loop that brought me up into a rain-screened clearing about the size and shape of a Little League field. I didn’t know where I was going, slashing through swaths of waist-high weed and thumping over frame-rattling boulders and mounds of rusted machine parts, hooked on the idea of momentum …

  Until I saw the cabin.

  No, I thought, no, this can’t be it, as I slammed on the brakes and skidded into a heap of scrap metal that featured a rusted boxspring and the exoskeleton of the first washing machine ever made. I’d experienced hiatuses between expectation and actuality before—who hasn’t? But this was staggering. Hunting lodge? The place was an extended shack, the yard strewn with refuse, the doorway gaping like an open mouth, like the hungry maw of the demon-god of abandoned houses demanding propitiation. Someone—Vogelsang, no doubt—had nailed tarpaper up on the outer walls in place of shingles, and there was a ridiculous white cloud of sheet Styrofoam lashed across the roof (in the hope of forestalling leaks, as I was later to learn). One thing I was sure of, even then, sitting stunned behind the fractured windshield of the stalled Toyota: no one had lived in the place for twenty years. Or more.

  Inside, it was worse. The roof leaked in eight places, the front door had blown in and torn back from its hinges, a furious collision of sumac and vetch darkened the windows. I dropped my duffel bag on the cracked linoleum floor (a floral pattern popular in the forties), and walked round the main room as if I were touring a museum. The room was L-shaped, roughly divided into kitchen and parlor. I paused over the .22 holes in the kitchen wall, the gas-powered refrigerator that had been nonfunctional for thirty years, the sink stained with the refuse of forgotten meals. There were two small bedrooms off the parlor, and a crude staircase that led to a third in the attic. The kitchen door gave onto a partially enclosed porch that connected with a dilapidated storage shed. Beyond the storage shed, a rust-pitted propane tank (Pro-Flame) and a grim, tree-choked ravine. I took all this in, shivering, and then turned to the stove.

  There were two stoves, actually. One was a range—combination gas and wood, circa 1935—and the other was a squat wood stove made of cast iron. There was no wood. All the clothes I owned were soaked through, my shoulders had begun to quake involuntarily, I was exhaling clouds. Something had to be done. Beyond the brown windows lay 390 acres of pine, hardwood and scrub, every stick of it wet as a sponge. I pictured myself back out in that dripping tangle, snapping off branches and peeling back strips of sodden bark, and dissolved the image as abruptly as I might have switched channels on the TV. Then I thought of the storage room, and slammed through the kitchen door in a rush, inadvertently flushing a bird that had been roosting in the porch beams. It flew up in my face like a bad dream, and then it was gone.

  The storage room was penumbral, cluttered with refuse. There were bundles of yellowed newspaper (TRUMAN CALLS FOR FAIR DEAL; DIMAGGIO UNRAVELS SOX), staved-in gasoline cans and remnants of what might once have been a hand loom. I stepped into the low-ceilinged room as I might have stepped into Pharaoh’s tomb, treading carefully, keeping an eye out for lucre—or rather, in this case, the merest splinter of anything combustible—among the heaps of rags, cans and bottles that flowed across the floor and slapped at the walls like the spillage of some diluvian tide. Dust lay over everything, white as pulverized bone. When I snapped a chair leg across my knee, a pair of sleek dark forms shot through the jagged window on the near side of the room. Rats, I thought absently—or maybe ground squirrels. Five minutes later I had a respectable pile of furniture fragments and odd pieces of lumber. I set it atop a bundle of mildewed newspaper, hauled the whole mess back into the main room, checked the flue on the stovepipe, and realized I didn’t have any matches.

  This was too much. I cursed. Kicked something. And then threw myself down on the stinking sun-faded sofa opposite the cold stove. Dust rose in a mighty swirling mushroom cloud and settled on my wet jacket. For a while I just sat there shivering, listening to the rain percolate through the ceiling and spatter the ancient linoleum, the storm laying down a screen of static outside. Then I heard the laboring engine of Phil’s pickup, churning its way up the mountain. They were in for a surprise, I thought, lifting myself from the sofa and gazing out through the open door at the raked and rugged hills, the trees like claws, the gray distance that couldn’t begin to suggest the gaps between ridges.

  Impatient, jittery, wet to the bone, I paced the room half a dozen times and then thought of looking over the bedrooms again, with an eye to staking a claim on one of them. The nearest was unremarkable: four walls, crudely done (some misguided soul had attempted to put up slabs of sheetrock and had given up halfway through the job), a torn mattress set atop a boxspring, a broom handle nailed diagonally across the far corner to serve as a clothing rack. I moved past it, down the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom, and then into the back bedroom. It was as spare and Essene as the first. The walls were pine slats, there was a boxspring propped up on wooden packing crates, an unfinished window looked out on the trees. At first I almost missed the calendar nailed to the inside of the door. But the door swung to on uneven hinges, and when I turned, it was staring me in the face.

  A calendar. I could hear the pickup rattling into the yard, the engine wheezing like a miler’s lungs. The picture over the month-and-date portion of the calendar featured a woman in a cloche hat, her face averted, skirt pinched to reveal her legs—a dull, brownish, Norman Rockwell sort of thing. But it wasn’t the picture that caught my eye. It was the year—1949, the year I was born. Odd, I thought, and then I noticed the month. November. My month. I could feel the blood rushing to my stomach, as if I’d been hit in the midsection, the impossible, nagging cosmic joke of it, the heavy black pencil strokes an act of the will, irrefutable, closing in on the very day. My day. My birthday. Circled in black.

  I stepped back involuntarily. “Hey, Felix!” Gesh was shouting from the front room. “You in there?” It was one of those moments that annihilate a lifetime of empirical assumptions with a sudden mocking laugh. “Felix!” Gesh shouted. I stepped back another pace, as bewildered and disoriented as if I’d just been slapped.

  Something was wrong here, and I didn’t like it. From childhood I’d been taught that there were answers for everything, that the square root of four was two, that the sky was blue because of the diffraction of light through dust particles in the atmosphere, that life originated from the action of an electrical charge on simple proteins. I was not superstitious. Like anyone else, I
knew that in an infinite and multifarious universe, the most bizarre coincidences were commonplace, were calculable probabilities. Nonetheless, I wanted to quit. Right then, right there, my face smarting and heart hammering, I wanted to quit.

  PART 2

  Germination

  Chapter 1

  Let me tell you about dirt.

  Brown dirt, red dirt, black dirt, yellow dirt. Dirt that sucks at your shoes, blackens your fingernails and seams the creases of your hands, dirt that dries to dust on the faded linoleum and settles in your lungs at night. Friable dirt, liquid dirt, dirt clods, bombs and bricks, sandy dirt, loamy dirt, dirt that reeks of corruption and slow rot. Dirt. The foundation of all things, the beginning and the end. We are made of dirt, not water, and in dirt we shall lie. At the summer camp we ate dirt, washed with dirt, slept in dirt in dirty sleeping bags; at the summer camp, no doubt about it, we lived close to the soil.

  You don’t encounter true dirt in the city, with its shoulder-to-shoulder buildings, its cement and its blacktop. But it is there—down in the sub-basement like a nasty primordial secret, clenched in the strangled roots of the trees, crushed beneath the heaving floor of the Bay itself. Dirt is problematic in the city, an element you perceive theoretically, intellectually. You don’t become aware of it on the experiential level until you dive for a Frisbee on the tame suburban grass of Golden Gate Park, and there it is—dirt—on the calf of your white pegged jeans. Or you come down in the morning to find minuscule grains of black dust on the windshield of your car, or take a stroll past a building site and see some actual raw hard-core dirt exposed like a cavity in a rotten tooth. Dirt, you say to yourself, how about that? Still, it’s an anomaly, an exception to the rule. You think about air in the city. You think about water, gasoline, broken glass and dog shit. But not dirt. Dirt just isn’t relevant.