Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Now, with Vogelsang twitching across the table and rattling on about Krugerrands, gypsum and Oriental rugs, I couldn’t resist sticking it to him just a bit, as he’d stuck it to me over the issue of the guns. “Oh, by the way,” I said, cutting him off in the middle of a panegyric to Bokharan weavers, “did I tell you a plane came over the other day?”

  Vogelsang set down his spoon, shot a glance out the window and then fumbled in his pocket for the vial of breath neutralizer. “Really?” he said, a barely perceptible sob cracking his voice.

  “Cessna, I think. One of those little jobs with the sculpted cockpit and the propeller out front?”

  He nodded. His features were drawn together, a string bag tightening at the neck, and the veins in his temple began to pulse.

  The plane had come roaring over the hill, big as a truck, no more than three hundred feet up. It buzzed the house twice, then circled the property and vanished over the far ridge. When it appeared Phil and I were out in the yard, fully exposed, unloading lengths of PVC pipe from the back of the pickup. First there was the explosion of noise, then the dust and the big swooping shadow, and then Phil was bolting for the house shouting, “Load up the car!” He’d actually tossed two boxes of his priceless mementoes into the back of the Jeep before I could calm him down.

  “Probably from that airstrip in Willits,” Vogelsang said. “One of those weekend daredevils.”

  I shrugged. “Whatever. But it wasn’t pleasant, that’s for sure. With two thousand holes in the ground this place must look like Swiss cheese from up there.”

  Vogelsang rapped the tabletop with the vial of breath sanitizer, then raised it to his mouth for a quick fix, as if vigilance against halitosis were the first step in his plan to subvert detection and subdue the world to his fiduciary advantage. Aorta slouched over an uneaten bowl of Familia, absorbed in a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, her nose ring flaring in a ray of early-morning sunlight. I was about to amplify the story of the Cessna—the eye in the sky, Gesh had called it—when suddenly the cabin began to tremble on its frame and a rumbling burst of sound threw me from my chair.

  Earthquake? Lightning bolt? The Russian invasion? The three of us lurched back from the table and rushed to the window, where we watched in stupefaction as an odd little parade passed in review. Sapers, on a huge thundering bulldozer, was steaming along the road adjacent to the house, followed by his son, Marlon, on a flatulent Moped. Intent on the controls and hunched in his filthy coveralls, Sapers never even turned his head; Marlon, his glasses glinting in the sun and big fleshy thighs and rear engulfing the bike as an amoeba might engulf a food particle, looked up, flashed us the peace sign, and then vanished into the trees along with his father.

  For an instant we were immobilized, struck dumb with panic and outrage. Then all three of us were out the door in blistering pursuit. “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” I choked as we leapt obstacles in the field and sprinted into the narrow roadway like hurdlers coming on for the tape. I was incensed, mortified, shot through with homicidal rage. What if he blundered off the road and into one of the growing areas? What if he caught sight of Gesh and Phil with the hoses or heard the pump? Vogelsang cursed, a series of truncated, doglike grunts, as he pumped his legs and flailed his goggles like a weapon; Aorta, gritting her teeth, ran neck-and-neck with us for a hundred yards or so before she stumbled and pitched forward into the dirt. We hardly noticed.

  Vogelsang and I were nearly at the bottom of the hill, a few hundred yards east of the water pump, when we ran out of breath and slowed to an agitated, stiff-legged walk. Hearts hammering, we hurried along the roadway until we emerged from a stand of laurel to see Sapers up ahead of us, maneuvering the bulldozer as if he were taking evasive action. As we drew closer, we could see Marlon standing in the shade of a tree and drinking something from a thermos, while his father dropped the blade of the bulldozer and began slamming away at the surface of the road. “Oh, Christ,” Vogelsang said, quickening his gait, “he’s grading the road.”

  He was indeed. We watched helplessly as he reversed gears, swung right and left, rumbled forward behind a ridge of detritus, cleared culverts, crushed vegetation, leveled and de-rutted the nearly impassable roadway. Gears wheezed, black diesel smoke snatched at the sky. “Hey!” I shouted, but the big polished treads just kept grinding along. Sweat coursed over my body—streams, rivulets, mighty deltas—the sun raked my face and thrust a clawing hand down my throat. Beside me, Vogelsang danced in place, pogo-ing up and down like a Masai tribesman. Though his face was concealed, I took his body language to indicate that he was feeling as disturbed, confused and impotent as I was. A few minutes later Aorta limped up to join us, and after watching the bulldozer churn back and forth a moment longer, we turned as if by accord and strolled over to where Marlon stood in the shade of a twisted oak.

  “Hello,” Vogelsang said, peeling back his surgical mask. Marlon’s immediate reaction was to bend awkwardly for the big plastic thermos and cradle it in his arms, as if he was afraid we’d come to snatch it away. He didn’t say a word, merely blinked at us out of pale demented eyes. His head was cropped as closely as Aorta’s, and it seemed disproportionately small against the bulk of him, the head of an ostrich or a sleepy brontosaur. “You know how far up the road your father’s planning to go?” Vogelsang asked.

  Marlon looked wildly from Vogelsang’s face to mine, as if we’d asked him to betray his family to the Gestapo or drop his pants and recite poetry, before his eyes finally settled on Aorta. A change suddenly came over his face. He gave her a long, lingering, stupefied look, a look compounded of wonder, greed and unbridled anarchic lust, and then he flushed red and turned away.

  “Marlon,” I snapped, striving for that tone of inquisitorial menace and condescension mastered by schoolmarms, drill sergeants and professional torturers, “you’re on private property now, you know—our property—and we want to know just what you think you’re doing here.” Meanwhile, I noticed with mounting panic that Sapers was moving his bulldozer back up the road in the direction from which we’d just come—toward the hill and our burgeoning secret.

  Marlon looked down at his feet (they were encased in black sneakers the size of griddles), and then lifted the thermos to his mouth and took a huge slobbering swallow that left his chin streaked with dark liquid and his shirtfront damp. He bobbed his head and his mouth began to work, some terrible trauma pushing itself up from his inner depths to convulse his frame with seismic shudders. “Drinking Coke,” he said finally with a sob. Then he turned his back on us and his great fleshy shoulders began to heave.

  All at once there was a hoot of surprise from Sapers and we jerked round to watch him ram the bulldozer into neutral and leap down from the thing in a geyser of water. Even from where we were standing I could see the ruptured plastic pipe, snapped like a twig and flung over the cutting edge of the blade in a sorry inverted V. Water spurted thirty feet into the air—a magic fountain, a gusher, a lid-flipped hydrant on 142nd Street—and suddenly we were running again. Out of breath, crazed, our cards laid out on the table for anyone to read.

  As we drew closer I could see that Sapers was clearly bewildered, the Willits Feed cap clutched in one grimy hand while the other scratched at the back of his head. “Lloyd!” Vogelsang shouted, stripping back goggles and hood, and Sapers turned to us with the blank uncomprehending stare of a flood or quake victim. “Lloyd, it’s me, Vogelsang.” Sapers had, of course, been aware of us all along, but had chosen to go about the business at hand rather than bother with social amenities. He had nothing to say to us in any case. Now, though, as I saw the look of enlightenment fan across his features, I realized that he couldn’t have recognized Vogelsang in his jumpsuit. He’d probably mistaken him for an escapee from the burn ward or a commando versed in chemical warfare—just another manifestation of the hostile weirdness we’d brought to his sleepy corner of the woods.

  We stood beside him now, Vogelsang grinning, Aorta scowling, the water slas
hing up into the burnt sky and plummeting down to explode in the dust. I felt like a circus animal—tiger, bear, lion—driven by the whip and making my final approach to the burning hoop. “What in God’s hell is that?” Sapers said finally. He was referring to the plastic pipe, which we’d buried beneath the disused roadway some two weeks earlier. I shrugged. Aorta put her hands on her hips and gave him a why-don’t-you-go-fuck-yourself stare. “Beats me,” Vogelsang said. “Christ, Lloyd, you know I hardly just bought the place—there’s all sorts of surprises here.”

  “But, but …” For the first time since I’d had the misfortune of meeting him, Sapers seemed at a loss for words. “But,” he stammered, waving his hand to take in the entire scene, “I been grading this road for twenty years and there’s never been no pipes in here before.”

  Vogelsang laughed, a maniacal, wound-up, child-molester’s laugh. “Christ,” he said, repeating himself, as if the invocation of a higher authority could somehow get him off the hook, “I just don’t know how to explain it, Lloyd. It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.” Vogelsang patted frantically at his pockets, searching for the breath neutralizer, which he finally located and used with obvious relief. “I guess we’ll just have to contact the DWP and see what they’ve been doing up here.”

  Sapers looked skeptical—he knew as well as I did that the water department had no business out in the hind end of the wilderness, that Vogelsang’s implication was as preposterous and unfounded as if he’d attributed the pipe to Soviet intervention or UFOs. From skepticism, he shifted to suspicion. I could see the change in his face, could see that he was about to say something more, something tougher, something that would poke holes in the entire fabric of lies we’d thrown up to mask our real purpose, when suddenly the gush of water fizzled out. One moment it was spouting like Old Faithful, and the next it was the trickle of a child at a urinal.

  “I’ll be damned,” Sapers said.

  Vogelsang put on a look of consternation and wonder, a look as phony as mine. The water had given out for a simple and intelligible reason: the pump had shut down. As programmed. We’d gauged the amount of gasoline required to run the pump until all our reservoirs were filled—at that point, the pump ran out of gas and shut itself down. Chuff-chuff, bang. Simple as that.

  We were standing around scratching our heads when suddenly a shadow fell across my back, and I swung round to confront a dejected Marlon, the thermos wedged beneath one fleshy arm, his eyes red with weeping. Behind us, the earthmover idled with a subdued chuffing roar, its surfaces glistening with water. Vogelsang had stepped forward to make a show of casually tossing the pipe aside, as if it meant nothing in the world to him—as if, like the rocks and trees and insects, it were just another manifestation of the marvelous in an endlessly puzzling universe—and was assuring Sapers that he’d look into the matter and straighten things out with the DWP or “whoever it was that was responsible.” Marlon began to whimper.

  “What’s with you?” Sapers snarled.

  The boy pointed a thick accusing finger at me. “He … he yelled at me, pop.”

  Sapers gave me a quick withering glance, a glance of contempt, hatred and disgust, then shot his eyes at his son. “Aaah, shut yer face, Fathead.” Then he looked at me again, a wicked little grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “So,” he roared, “how’s the writin’ goin’, Shakespeare?”

  The third problem was neither mechanical nor human. It was instead a manifestation of the wilderness itself, of nature red in tooth and claw, of the teeming, irrational life that surrounds and subsumes us and that our roads and edifices and satellites struggle so hard to deny. It became evident about two weeks after the bulldozer incident. Vogelsang had long since repaired to the cool, umbrageous, sumac-free corridors of his Bolinas lodge, the sun had mounted a degree or two higher in the blistering sky, and the vital, life-sustaining flow of the irrigation system had settled into a pattern of smooth reliability we’d begun to take for granted. Then, one torrid morning (we watered in the morning and evening, for obvious reasons and in accordance with Dowst’s superfluous instructions), as I picked up the hose to drench our Jonestown growing area in cool translucent aqua pura, I was stunned to find that none was forthcoming. Perplexed, I flailed the hose along its coiled length, stretched it, peered into the nozzle like a clown in a slapstick routine. Nothing. Next, I followed the hose to the nearest cluster of 55-gallon drums, only to find them empty, and finally made my lung-wrenching way up the precipitous incline to the main reservoir above the Khyber Pass. There I discovered that all six 330-gallon horse-troughs were dry, and concluded that the pump must have malfunctioned. But after stumbling back down the spine of the mountain, through thorn and briar and banks of stinging nettle, I found that the pump had in fact dutifully consumed its gas, pumped its water and shut itself down. So where was the water?

  My cohorts were hunched blearily over breakfast when I stepped through the door and informed them that there was a major break somewhere along the pipeline. They yawned, scratched, farted, their eyes like hunted things. A fork rang out as it made contact with knife or plate, two pairs of lips sucked at the rims of coffee mugs. Since the heat had set in, we’d taken to staying up late into the night, drinking, shooting the bull, playing poker, Monopoly, and pitch, and resting through the ferocious dizzying heat of the afternoon. We alternated morning watering assignments, Dowst pulling his weight like the rest of us—when he was there. On this particular morning, as on most mornings, he was not there. No: he was in Sausalito, in his breezy, ocean-cooled apartment, no doubt knocking himself out to come up with the additional seeds we so desperately needed.

  Gesh looked up from a greasy plate of scrambled eggs and chorizo and asked if I’d checked the pump. I nodded. Phil was bent over a sketch pad. The fires of artistic expression had been lately rekindled in him by the proximity of so much antique junk—an entire yardful of bedsprings, machine parts and dismantled automobiles—and he was working out the blueprint for a major new sculpture that promised to be “a monument to our heroic agricultural efforts.” Without glancing up he asked if I’d checked the upper reservoir. “Uh-huh,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee that looked and tasted like molasses laced with stomach acid.

  There was a ruminative silence, during which a lizard darted out of the breadbox and lashed across the wall, and then Gesh set down his fork and drained his juice glass in a single decisive gulp. “Sounds like there’s a break in the line,” he announced.

  We found it almost immediately. The main line from the pump had been breached just below the Jonestown area, punctured in half a dozen places as if savaged with a sharp instrument or blasted at close quarters with a .22. “Kids,” Phil said. “Fourteen-year-old punks.” The pipe, which we’d simply laid out on the surface of the ground, certainly looked as if it had been intentionally vandalized. It was a tense moment. If adolescent vandals were roaming the woods, not only could they wreak havoc on our operation and make off with half the crop, they could expose us to the authorities as well—or perhaps they already had. I watched as the realization filtered through my companions’ faces, fear and loathing and murderous intent flickering in their eyes. “Maybe it was Sapers,” I said, knowing it wasn’t. “Or Marlon?”

  It was Gesh, the Angeleno, the city kid, who came up with the conjecture that proved conclusive. “Animals,” he said. “Something big.” We looked closer. Sure enough, there were the telltale signs: coiled heaps of dung flecked with berries, clumps of stinking reddish hair, tracks the size of Ping-Pong paddles. In the first rush of paranoia we’d somehow managed to overlook them, but now we saw clearly that the agency of destruction was animal rather than human. I guessed that the vandal must have been a bear, but if so, the creature’s motives remained obscure. What was the attraction in a twenty-foot length of mottled plastic pipe? Gesh had an answer for this, too: the bear was thirsty. And lazy. Instead of clambering down the hill to the stream, he could drink his fill—and have a shower in the bargai
n—simply by puncturing any link of our aqueduct he happened across.

  The existence of the presumptive bear was confirmed three days later when Phil, buzzing along the lower road on the 125-cc Kawasaki, rounded a corner to discover an obstruction in his path. The obstruction, on closer examination, turned out to be a lumpy, broad-beamed, auburn-colored thing squatting over a fresh mound of berry-flecked excrement: viz., the bear. With a blare of horror the bear lurched up, feinted to the right and then scrambled off down the roadway, Phil in pursuit. The animal’s great shaggy hindquarters pumped at the dirt, Phil gripped the accelerator like a fighter ace zeroing in for the kill, leaves rushed by in a blur. One hundred yards, two hundred yards, three. And then, as if he’d been schooled in diversionary tactics, the bear suddenly skewed off into a scrub-choked ravine, while Phil, caught up in the heat of the chase, rammed a downed tree, tore the front wheel from the bike and did a triple-gainer into the stiff brown brush. The Kawasaki was wrecked, and Phil suffered a strained shoulder in addition to contusions both major and minor, but at least we’d firmly and finally established the identity of our antagonist.

  An uneventful week slipped by, the heat like the flat of a sword, dull and stultifying, and then the bear struck again. This time he chewed through a pipe on the lower slope, and the enormous pressure of the gravity-feed shattered the plastic and sent a jet of water rocketing forty feet in the air. By the time we arrived on the scene, the dripping ecstatic creature had lumbered off, taking a section of deer fencing and eight healthy cannabis plants with him. “This has got to stop,” Gesh growled, kicking angrily at the ravaged pipe. I watched his face through its dangerous permutations, watched as he flung sticks and stones at the mute leaves that surrounded us, bearlike himself in his bulk and his rage. Finally he turned to Phil and me to announce in a dead flat tone that the bear had to go: it was him or us.