Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Gesh put out poisoned baits that afternoon—marrow bones and kidneys soaked in strychnine—while Phil and I replaced the length of damaged pipe. The bloody heaps of flesh didn’t look particularly appetizing, covered as they were with flies both quick and dead, but I assumed it wouldn’t make much difference to a scavenging garbagophagist with a taste for plastic pipe and Campbell’s Chunky Soup cans. I was wrong. As far as we could tell the bear never touched any of the baits, though one afternoon I did find a dead turkey vulture sprawled in the bushes like a discarded parasol.

  As if in compensation for denying himself the baits, the bear took to rummaging through our garbage each night, disemboweling the green plastic bags with the alligator fasteners, gnawing cans and spreading a slick coat of mashed vegetable matter, grease and undifferentiated slime over the porch. Gesh saw this as a provocation. He spent the better part of an afternoon rigging up a battery-powered light system that would illuminate the bewildered scavenger’s shaggy nighttime form just long enough to spell his doom. Pissed off, grim, wrapped in an old poncho and chain-smoking joints, Gesh sat up with the shotgun, waiting for the bear to signal his appearance with the fatal clank of can or bottle. When dawn spread her rosy fingers over the eastern sky, garbage was spread over the floorboards of the porch as usual, and Gesh was staring numbly down the barrel of his gun. “Never heard a thing,” he said, his voice trailing off.

  Then, in a succession of lightning raids, the bear consumed three quarts of motor oil, dragged a section of barbed-wire fence half a mile into the woods, punctured two more lengths of PVC pipe and knocked out the back window of the cabin to get at a case of apricot preserves (which he ate, shards of glass and all, without apparent harm). This time he’d gone too far: it was obvious that he had to be dealt with, and dealt with severely. We began to carry weapons when we made our rounds.

  It was a clear, baking, Sonoran-desert sort of morning when I ambled through Julie Andrews’s Meadow (now brown as the pampas) on my way to our most remote and least propitious growing area. The plants in the meadow were rigid, verdant and strong, two and a half or three feet high already, and I stopped a minute to admire them. I had a hoe slung over my shoulder, and the .357 magnum pistol tucked in my belt. The hoe was for weeding the sorry marijuana patch we’d dubbed “Duke’s Heel,” in ironic acknowledgment of George Deukmejian, the fanatical attorney general of the state of California, who’d been known to direct paratroop assaults on isolated marijuana farms and bring in a TV crew to record them; the pistol was for the bear. If I spotted him, I would shoot him. Or at least attempt to.

  As I gave the springy serrate leaves a final proprietary pat and headed off across the meadow, I thought how incongruous it all was, how primitive, how much an atavism to go gunning for bear in an age when we couldn’t even recognize true dirt. From childhood I’d been taught to revere wildlife, to raise my voice against the multinational corporations, corrupt shepherds, reactionary presidents and robber barons who would strip, rape and pollute the land. I’d sat through ecology classes in high school, turned out for Save the Whale rallies and Tree People boosters and fired off letters to congressmen protesting offshore-drilling amendments. I deplored the slaughter of the bison and passenger pigeon alike, recoiled from the venality of those who draped themselves in ocelot or wore boots fashioned from the belly of the gavial. Who wouldn’t? But then it was easy to take a moral stance while munching an avocado-and-sprout sandwich in a carpeted apartment in New York or San Francisco. Now I was on the other side of the fence, now I was confronting nature at the root rather than lying back and reading about it. And at root, nature was dirty, anarchic, undisciplined, an enemy to progress and the American dream. Incongruous though it may have seemed, and though I was subscriber to the principles of the Sierra Club and a member of the Coyote Protective Society, I ambled across that field fingering the pistol and ready—no, seething—to kill.

  Duke’s Heel consisted of forty stunted plants concealed beneath the canopy of two rugged old serpentine oaks. We’d planted here without much hope, breaking a crust of hardpan to dig the holes for the late-sprouters and withered backup plants Dowst had managed to tease into existence. I was planning to hack out the weeds, water and fertilize the plants, and check the deer fencing. But when I descended the back slope of the meadow, I saw immediately that something was wrong. For one thing, the fence was down, and as I drew closer I saw that an entire section of chicken wire had been accordioned, balled up as if under the pressure of some immense crushing weight. For another—and this was a shock—the ground was barren. Where before there had been the sweet succulent green of the struggling plants, now there was only dirt, yellow-brown and naked. I threw the hoe aside, drew the gun from my belt and ran headlong down the hill.

  After the glare of the sun on the open field, the shade beneath the trees was disorienting, and I drew up short, breathing hard, my eyes raking the shadows. A bear, I thought, and the thought was numbing: I’m going to shoot a bear. No rabbit, no squirrel, no soft-eyed defenseless doe: a bear. Tooth, sinew and muscle, four hundred pounds of raging hirsute flesh, claws the size of fingers, jaws that could deracinate limbs and pulverize bone. Standing there in the penumbra of the tree, blinking back panic and squinting till my eyes began to tear, I suddenly recalled a story I’d read as a boy in True or Outdoor Life or some such place: a grizzly had attacked an Aleut guide and raked his face off— eyes, nose, lips, teeth—and the Indian had crawled twenty miles with his hamburger features and panicked an entire village. Then he died.

  My hand quaked as I held the gun out before me. It was quiet, the only sound a distant hum of insects and the chock-chock-chock of some hidden bird. Aside from a scattering of leaves, there was no trace of the plantlings we’d put in the ground here—every last one had been uprooted. I looked closer and recognized the now familiar paddlelike tracks in the dirt. And then, with a start, I realized that I was not alone in the clearing beneath the trees.

  For some seconds I’d been filtering out a steady and distinctive background noise—a low wheezing ripple and snort of air, an asthmatic sound, like the hiss of a vacuum cleaner with the slightest obstruction in the wand. Now the sound began to register, and I traced it to a tangle of branch and weed at the far perimeter of the growing area, no more than thirty feet away. In that moment I experienced a revelation that slammed at my knees and swabbed my throat dry: the bear was in that tangle. Not only was he in there, but he was asleep, and what I’d been hearing was the steady sibilant rise and fall of his snores. But why, I asked myself, would this canny night-raider leave himself wide open to the hurts of the world, laid out like a wino at the very scene of the crime—and in broad daylight?

  The answer came like a fanfare: he was stoned, that’s why. Obliterated, wasted, kayoed, down for the count, his great bruin’s belly swollen with the remains of forty pot plants. I listened to his breathing, deep and restful, insuck and outflap: yes, the bear was in there all right, sleeping off a monumental high, snoring as contentedly as if he’d just toddled off to his den for a long winter’s nap.

  This was it, I thought, this was my chance. I could empty the magazine and fling myself into the highest branches of the tree before he knew what hit him. I scrutinized the welter of leaves with the intensity of a hit man, probing for a target. There, that was the cracked black sole of his foot, wasn’t it? Yes! And there, buried in the vegetation, the immense mottled hulk of him, like a heap of moldy carpet someone had scraped from the floor of a flooded basement. I steadied the pistol with my left hand, as Vogelsang had demonstrated, and took aim.

  A big bloated second ticked by, the bear snoring, my finger clutching the trigger as if it were my pass to the realms of glory. I remembered the scoutmaster, the bull’s-eye target perforated with .22 holes, Vogelsang and the shotgun. But this was not the shotgun, this was the pistol, and its use required skill and concentration. What if I missed? Or merely wounded him? And if I killed him, then what? Would I bury him? Skin him and eat him? Leave
him for the maggots? I lowered the gun. You’d have to be heartless, a degenerate blood-crazed butcher, to shoot a sleeping bear. There he lay in all his splendor, denizen of slope and glade, hibernator, bee-keeper, omnivore, symbol of the wild and born free: who was I to take his life? Perhaps I could simply fire in the air and scare him off. But that left open the possibility that instead I’d scare him into springing up and removing my face. I thought of slinking away, going for Gesh and Phil and the shotgun, sharing the danger and the terrible responsibility both. But no. There was no time for that. The bear was raiding our crops, destroying everything we’d worked and planned for, threatening the very success of the project itself. I raised the gun. Kill! a voice shrieked in my ear. Kill!

  At that moment, my options were suddenly reduced to zero. For the bear, perhaps sensing on some deep instinctual level that he was half a step from eternity, awoke, and poked his huge grizzled snout from the bushes. He was lying on his side, raising his head wearily, like a commuter roused by the first buzz of the alarm clock. For an instant we regarded each other in bewilderment. His great chocolate eyes were striated with red veins, marijuana leaves hung from his drooping jaw, and his odor—the feculent, rancid, working stench of him—enveloped me. I was stunned. Terrified. Entranced.

  The bear broke the spell. He rolled to his feet like an old sow shaking up from the dust, a sapling snapped under the weight of him and I fired. BOOM! The report of the gun was loud as a howitzer blast. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! I fired again and again, backing away simultaneously, all my circuits open wide.

  I missed.

  When the smoke cleared, the bear was standing there precisely as he had been an instant earlier, but now his eyes were seized with intimations of mortality. He gave me one quick dumbfounded look, as if to say “You’re really serious about all this, aren’t you?,” and then he was gone.

  He took the back fence with him, and cleared a path through the scrub that would have accommodated Clyde Beatty’s elephants. For a long while I could hear him crashing through the brush, and I listened till the sound was absorbed in the hum of the insects and the bored, quotidian chock-chock-chock of the hidden bird.

  Chapter 2

  Even before I could think to set down the sack of German beer, cold cuts and cannolis tucked under my arm, I’d hit every light-switch in the place, flicked on the air conditioner, tuned the TV to some cretinous game show and dropped the stylus on Carmina Burana at killing volume. This was living. I felt like Stanley emerged from the jungle, Zeus hurling thunderbolts; I felt liberated, triumphant, omnipotent. Machines hummed and clicked at my command, breezes blew and trumpets rang out. I was home.

  Gesh followed me up the stairs like a page, his arms laden with wine, kaiser rolls, grapes, olives, anchovies, taco chips, Dijon mustard and artichoke hearts. It was two p.m., Friday, the start of the Fourth of July weekend, and we were a hundred and fifty miles from the heat, dust and disrepair of the summer camp. I was overjoyed. Save for a trip to Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply in Santa Rosa, this was the first time I’d left Willits in four months. Four months: I could hardly believe it. The world had gone on, governments rising and falling, economic indicators in a tailspin, people scheming, dying, erecting shopping centers and committing acts of heroism and depravity, and all the while I’d been sitting on my ass in the hinterlands, contracting poison oak and facing down rednecks and bears. But now, now at long last, sacrifice would have its reward: Gesh and I were on a three-day furlough, horny and wild and crotchsore as drovers descending on Abilene.

  Phil, who had experienced some measure of relief in Tahoe the previous weekend, had reluctantly agreed to stay behind and tend the plants. “I can handle it,” he said, and then, playing on our fears, “so long as Sapers stays where he belongs and the bear doesn’t come poking around again.” We scarcely heard him. After sixteen weeks of abstinence—sixteen weeks during which we leered at sheep, slavered over farm girls in the two-hundred-pound class and built elaborate fantasies around the whores of Rio—we were strung just as tightly as the horniest zit-faced adolescent. Bears, cops, commandos, insolvency, failure, ignominy and incarceration: none of it mattered. Our eyes were glazed with romance, we were already lifting cocktails in lush gleaming bars full of secretaries, cosmeticians, poetesses and lutanists, the field of our perception narrowed to a single sharp focus. For the present, we had one concern and one concern only: women.

  Gesh made the sandwiches while I showered and shaved. Then, while he was anointing himself, I made a few phone calls, hoping to connect with one of the girls I’d dated sporadically over the past year or so. I was disappointed. Amy and Marcia, I learned, had married, and I offered them my feeble congratulations. Giselle was in France, Corinne had joined the army, and Annie was dead. When Annie’s phone didn’t answer, I called her sister, who erupted in sobs at the mention of her name. It was a shock. Annie, declaimer of poetry, danseuse, cat-lover, Annie of the quick smile and athletic legs, had been laid low, cut down by a Coup de Ville as she crossed Market Street on her Moped. All I’d wanted was the fleeting comfort of pressing my flesh to hers—all I’d wanted was love—and instead I’d been given a whiff of the grave. O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,/O Priestess in the vaults of Death …

  “Bummer,” Gesh said, flailing his hair with a plastic brush.

  I didn’t mean to be insensitive, but I couldn’t have agreed more: it was an inauspicious beginning, and the shock of it dampened my mood as automatically as would the news of an earthquake in Cincinnati or the outbreak of the Third World War. Gesh sat in the corner, a beer between his legs, subdued, watching me. What could I say? It was too bad, a shame and a pity and all that. Still, we were off the farm, and that alone was enough to ignite us again. Before long we were dribbling beer down our chins and bellowing along with Orff. We ate the sandwiches, drank the beer, graduated from Orff to the Stranglers, the Rude Boys and finally the Armageddon Sisters, and then flung ourselves out the door.

  Our first stop was the Mexican laundry, where we deposited eight swollen sacks of towels, T-shirts and undershorts in varying stages of fermentation and stained with paint, grease, sweat, tomato paste, Rose’s Lime Juice and the essence of bear. Next we drove up to Ashbury Heights to visit one of Gesh’s acquaintances, a recreational pharmacologist who occupied the dingy servants’ quarters of a twenty-room Edwardian mansion he shared with a lawyer and his wife, a lesbian couple, three Iranian students and an out-of-work carpenter. We passed through an iron gate, ascended marble steps. Gesh knocked.

  There was a cacophony of canine yelps and snarls, a scrambling of paw and toenail against the inner door and then the irascible tones of a distant voice: “Coming. Coming.” A moment later, a short angry character with a buzzhead haircut simultaneously swung back the door and kicked savagely at a pair of trembling Gordon setters. “Yeah?” he said, pinning us with a malevolent look.

  “Rudy in?” Gesh said.

  Without a word, Buzzhead simply turned and walked off into the shadows, leaving the door wide open and the skittish dogs shivering at the doorframe. I followed Gesh, pulling the door shut behind me, the wet noses of the dogs poking at my hands as we passed through a crepuscular entrance hall jagged with furniture—highboys, lowboys, armoires, sideboards. The entrance hall gave onto a drawing room heaped with boxes of clothes and books and smelling of cat litter. “This way,” Gesh said, and we followed a paneled corridor past another disused room, descended a flight of stairs and pushed through a curtain into a small apartment.

  There was an odor of onions, tobacco, rubbing alcohol. In the corner, stretched out on a bare mattress and spotlighted in the glow of a tensor lamp, a man with plaited hair held a paperback book to his face. Aside from the mattress, which lay on the floor, and a number of milk crates ranged against the wall and stuffed with books, shoes, clothing and newspapers, the only furniture in the room was a safe the size of a refrigerator. “Hey,” the man said as we entered the room, and then he sprang up from the bed like a predator, snarling, �
��Get out, get out, you fucking beasts!”

  He was referring to the dogs.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered, and there was real vehemence in his tone. “Stinking hairy bastards.” Then he grabbed Gesh’s hand and his face erupted in a grin. “Gesh!” he boomed. “How the fuck are you?”

  Gesh said he had no complaints, and then nodded at me. “Rudy,” he said, “Felix.” I opted for the soul shake, but Rudy came straight on and twisted my hand around as if it were a salami on a string. Then he turned abruptly, padded to the safe and began spinning the tumblers. “So,” he shouted over his shoulder, “you hear anything from Ziggy?”

  Gesh responded to this—no, he hadn’t heard from Ziggy but someone had told him he was waiting tables in Lahaina—while I studied Rudy. Aside from one or two of the pus-eyed reprobates clutching bottles in doorways off Mission Street, Rudy was the oddest, unhealthiest, most unsavory-looking character I’d laid eyes on in years. He was barefoot, wearing a torn pair of Jockey shorts and a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a NUKE THE WHALES button appended to the shoulder; his bare legs were hairless, the skin more yellow than white. His hair was plaited in tight cornrows that alternated with furrows of pink scalp as if his head were the blueprint for a maze, he was chinless and skinny as a concentration camp survivor, his nose was shoved up into his face and his eyes were too big for their sockets, stretching the lids like beer bellies poking out from beneath shrunken T-shirts.