Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)
Page 20
From across the cell, the shoplifter’s voice twitched with the modulations of the hormonal imbalance. “Shoplifting,” he said.
“Me,” the Indian said, “I’m in here for nothing. Breathing, that’s all. I’m in here because I don’t own a Lincoln Continental.”
There were footsteps in the hallway, I heard the clank of a metal door and then a voice calling out my name. I jumped up. The big medieval key rattled in the lock. “Nasmyth,” the voice repeated. “Come with me.”
Phil was waiting for me in the anteroom. He clutched a bulging business envelope in one hand and he was grinning sheepishly, as if he were the one who should be apologizing. The office was small and cramped; the night-shift cop sat at his desk shuffling papers and looking worn and weary. Phil embraced me in the traditional back-slapping way, then counted out twenty crisp one-hundred-dollar bills for the man at the desk, folded the receipt away in his wallet, and led me out the door. “You all right?” he said.
I mumbled a reply, hangdog, mortified, not knowing what to say. Gone were the visions, fled the dreams. I felt I’d let everyone down, felt that I alone had stuck the pin in our balloon and destroyed what nosy neighbors, hostile townsfolk, anarchic bears and inclement weather couldn’t. How could we go on now? I’d attracted the notice and aroused the enmity of Jerpbak. The summer camp was dead.
We climbed into the Toyota in silence. Phil drove. He insisted on it, in fact, treating me like an invalid, as if the six hours I’d spent behind bars had so sapped me I was unable to depress the pedals or manipulate the shift lever. He left the police station headed in the wrong direction, made several stops—for cigarettes, for gas, for an It’s It—pulled in and out of driveways, looped back on himself, and finally emerged from an obscure dirt road just opposite Shirelle’s Bum Steer. For a long while we merely sat there, the engine idling raggedly, as he studied the blacktop and peered into the rearview mirror with the intensity of a U-boat captain lining up a target on his periscope. Then, without warning, he hit the accelerator and the Toyota leapt out onto the roadway like a drag racer. Phil glanced at me in the rushing darkness. “Evasive action,” he explained.
It was the first thing either of us had said since we’d left the police station. We’d been lost in our own thoughts, measuring out the sentence of doom, trying to accommodate ourselves to disappointment and failure. “So how’s Vogelsang taking it?” I said.
I studied Phil’s profile in the glow of the dashboard. It was unrevealing. He was all nose, chin and Adam’s apple, like a caricature. I thought at first he might be suppressing a grin, but I couldn’t be sure—he might have been frowning, too. Just then the tires squealed, we lurched around a corner and slowed as we hit the pitted surface of the road up to the summer camp. Phil shrugged. “He’s up there now, waiting for you. Everybody’s in a panic.”
“Look,” I began, and the weight of what I was about to say nearly choked me, “maybe I ought to quit the project. I mean, get out of everybody’s way. You guys don’t really need me now that the heavy stuff’s over with.”
The car shivered on its worn springs, bushes scraped at the side panels with the rasp of knives on a whetstone. “You don’t have to do that,” Phil said, his voice soft. He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “We’ll work something out.”
It was two a.m. We rumbled into the field in front of the house and jerked to a halt beside Vogelsang’s Saab. It was a moonless night, stars high and cold like pinpricks in the fabric of the universe. There was the usual chorus of nocturnal insects, the uncertain hump of Dowst’s van and the shadowy displacement of space that indicated the pickup and Jeep. I glanced up and saw that all the windows of the cabin were aglow.
I’d been gone a little over sixty hours. Gesh and I had clambered into the car on Friday like escapees from the chain gang, like troupers boarding the bus for home after a tour of Piscagoula, Little Rock and Des Moines. Now it was Monday morning, and I was back. For months I’d been desperate to leave the place, ticking off the days like a prisoner in solitary, looking up from shovel or come-along and seeing cement, brick and asphalt, lying in my sweaty sheets and dreaming of cold beers, hot showers, checkered tablecloths and discerning waiters; but now, as Phil and I mounted the steps of the porch, I felt I’d come home. It was odd. In a moment we would push through the door to dirt, heat, chaos, to the feeble glow of Coleman lanterns and the scuff of lizards on the wall—and it would be all right. Suddenly I was crushed with regret. I was going to have to face them all—Vogelsang, Dowst, Aorta, Gesh, Phil, my co-workers and comrades—and tell them I was going to quit. Walk out with nothing. Sacrifice myself for the good of all. I didn’t know what I’d do if they took me up on it.
The door swung open and four faces turned to look up at me as if I were a specimen in the zoo. There was a stink of rancid garbage, insects batted at the Coleman lanterns, shadows clung to the corners. My business partners were seated at the kitchen table, ranged round the Monopoly board, beleaguered by coffee cups, an empty rum bottle, brightly colored cards, the spurious lucre of the game’s treasury. They looked anxious. And tired. I couldn’t help noticing that Vogelsang held the deeds to half a dozen properties, had accumulated a mountain of cash and erected hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. Gesh picked up a Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go card as we stepped in the door.
“Felix,” somebody said, and then they were all on their feet, nosing around me like hounds worrying the carcass of a rabbit. All except Vogelsang, that is. He sat there stoically, his features inscrutable, thumbing through his play money like Joe Stalin examining photographs of disloyal party chiefs. Though it was the middle of the night, and he had no intention of stepping out the door or coming into contact with any form of vegetative life, let alone poison oak, he was nonetheless wearing his NASA jumpsuit. I tried not to look at him.
For the first few minutes everyone was solicitous. Gesh poured me a shot of vodka, the only thing we had in the house, Dowst brewed some lukewarm tea, Aorta regarded me with interest, and Vogelsang asked some indirect questions pertaining to the nature of my confinement and how much the law knew about me. I alternately sipped warm vodka and cold tea, my stomach curdling with the bitter culture of guilt and dereliction, while Gesh tried to make sense of things.
Like the others, he was puzzled. What had I done? What was it all about? One minute he’d been snoring against the window frame, and the next he was staring into the whipcrack face of a highway patrolman. The patrolman said nothing, merely pointed to where I sat in the back seat of the cruiser, returned to his car and thundered up the highway. Gesh stared after us, incredulous, then drove to a phone booth and called Vogelsang. Vogelsang asked what had happened, and Gesh was only able to say that I’d been handcuffed to some woman and hauled off by the police. Gesh looked at me for confirmation, elucidation, enlightenment. I looked down at the floor.
Gesh’s voice faltered, then picked up again. Luckily, Vogelsang kept some cash on hand for just such an emergency, and promised to get on the horn to his lawyer and then drive up to Willits with the bail money. Fine. Terrific. Gesh had hung up, feeling relieved, but then found himself at a loss. He didn’t dare go near the police station, for fear he’d be implicated in whatever it was I’d done, and he couldn’t very well sit by the phone booth for the rest of the night. All at once it occurred to him that he should hustle up to the summer camp and alert Phil, in the event that legions of troopers were even then surrounding the place. They weren’t, and he’d had no recourse but to sit tight and soothe his frazzled nerves with alcohol. This he’d apparently succeeded in doing, as he was half drunk at the moment, the words clinging to his lips as if they’d been written out on strips of paper and pasted to the roof of his mouth. When he finished, everyone turned to me. I’d never known a more miserable moment.
“It was really stupid,” I said finally, and the room fell silent. The sound of the moths beating against the lamp screen transferred itself to my head, a frenzied thumping patter of drums
. Beyond the windows, something—some creature of the night—let out a short sharp yip of pain or bloodlust. Hesitantly, like a man on the couch trying to reconstruct a dream, I told them what had happened, sparing no detail, and concluded by reasserting that the whole thing had been a foolish mistake, which I heartily regretted. No one said a word. “I feel like I’ve let everybody down,” I said after a moment. “I mean, Jerpbak’s got a vendetta against me now. I don’t see how I can go on.”
Dowst was watching me like a shark moving in on a gutted mackerel. Vogelsang was so alert I thought he was about to snap to attention and salute. Phil and Gesh averted their eyes.
“What I’m saying is, for the sake of the project I think it would be better if I quit.”
“No,” Gesh said. “You can’t do that.”
Phil screwed up his lazy eye and gave me a look of loyalty and camaraderie, a look that said teak tables and marble-topped oyster bars be damned. “I don’t see why you can’t stay on,” he said. “It’s not as though you got busted for a drug offense or anything, and Vogelsang already said his lawyer can postpone the trial till after the harvest. …”
“How much would you want?” Dowst said. “I mean, how would we split?” And then, in a rush: “Because you’d be breaking your contract.”
“That’s up to us, isn’t it?” Gesh shot back. “Me, Phil and Felix are together, remember?”
“Just asking, that’s all.” Dowst tugged at the flange of his long Yankee nose. “But I think he’s right—he ought to quit. For the sake of us all.”
Gesh had been sitting on the kitchen counter, legs dangling. Now he leapt to his feet. “Yeah, and maybe you ought to quit, too. You don’t do jack-shit up here anyway. Maybe you ought to just hump off to Sausalito and write a couple of articles on the chokeberry or something, huh?”
“Wait a minute,” Vogelsang said, pushing himself up from the table, “there’s no reason to get excited. I think there’s a rational solution to all this. You’ve got to remember”—pacing now—“we’ve got a thousand plants in the ground and we need Felix to help water and harvest them. We’re a long way from home yet.”
A thousand plants? What was that all about? Was he saying we had only half what we’d projected? I did some quick figuring, couldn’t help myself: one-third of $250,000 equals $83,333.33. Shit. All this for a lousy eighty-three thousand dollars? It wasn’t worth it. But then another part of me just as quickly grasped at it as if it were untold millions, as if I were a fever-wracked explorer clutching the map to the elephant burial ground in my trembling insatiable hands.
“I don’t see how—“ Dowst began, but Vogelsang cut him off.
“How about this,” Vogelsang said, spinning round to face us like Clarence Darrow delivering his peroration. “Felix stays. But for the next four and a half months,” and he ticked them off on his fingers, “July, August, September, October and the beginning of November, neither he nor the Toyota ever leaves the property.”
They were looking at me appraisingly now, the jury bringing in a guilty verdict. “No time off for good behavior?” I said, trying to make a joke of it.
“It’s up to you, Felix,” Vogelsang said. “I don’t see any other way. It’s going to be tough—you won’t even be able to go into town for groceries or anything. But that’s it. We can’t take the risk.” He was fumbling in his shirt pocket for something, the vial of breath neutralizer, no doubt, found himself frustrated, and then glanced back up at me. “You agree?”
I sat there in my chair like a prisoner in the dock, my face expressionless, a surge of joy and relief rising like a shout in my chest. I’d expected the worst—doom and exile—and I’d merely been sentenced to life at hard labor. Four and a half months of the farm. No Petra, no Chinowa, no fresh bagels or Sunday paper, no music, no films, no leisurely cups of capuccino at coffeehouses in North Beach. Nothing but tedium, dust, lizards and heat. And a chance to make it work.
“Well?” Vogelsang said.
Did I have a choice? I nodded my head. “Agreed.”
Chapter 5
Let me tell you about attrition. About dwindling expectations, human error, Mother Nature on the counteroffensive. Let me tell you about days without end, about the oppression of mid-afternoon, about booze and dope, horseshoes, cards, paperbacks read and reread till their covers fall to pieces, let me tell you about boredom and the loss of faith.
First off, Vogelsang was right. There were only a thousand plants in the ground. Or to be more precise, nine hundred fifty-seven. I know: I counted them. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke the day following my sojourn in the town jail. Early on, we’d planted better than one thousand seedlings, and then Dowst had managed to sprout and plant some six or seven hundred more—at least. Or so he’d said. We were aware that we’d fallen short of our original estimate, but we had no idea by how much. Five percent? Ten? Fifteen? It wasn’t our concern. We were the workers, the muscle, the yeomen, and Dowst and Vogelsang were the managers. The number of plants in the ground and the condition of those plants was their business; ours was to dig holes, string and mend fences, repair the irrigation system, and see that each plant got its two and a half gallons of H2O per day. And so we’d never counted the plants. Never felt a need to. There were so many, after all, forests of them, their odor rank and sweet and overpowering, that we simply let ourselves get caught up in the fantasy of it, the wish that fulfills itself: of course we had two thousand plants.
But Vogelsang never made mistakes, and now I wasn’t so sure.
I lay there a moment atop my sweaty sleeping bag, a soiled sheet twisted at my ankles, and then staggered into the kitchen for a glass of water. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and the house was already so hot you could have baked bread on the counter. Phil was stretched out on the sofa behind a tattered copy of an E. Rice Burroughs novel, perfectly inert, a tall vodka collins in his hand. I peered through the yellowed window and saw that both van and Saab were gone. “Vogelsang and Dowst leave already?” I said.
Phil snorted. “What do you think—they’d stick around here a second more than they had to?” From above, in the insupportable heat of the loft, Gesh’s snores drifted down, dry as husks.
I drank from the tap, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Last night,” I began, rummaging through the refuse on the counter for a knife, peanut butter and bread, “Vogelsang said we’ve only got a thousand plants in the ground—that’s crazy, isn’t it?”
Phil shrugged. I was watching his face and he was watching mine. “I don’t know, seems like there’s a million when you’re watering.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know what you mean,” but fifteen minutes later I was out there in the feverish hammering heat of midday, notebook in hand, counting.
Bushes had gone brown, the grass was stiff and yellow. I trod carefully, terrified of the rattlesnakes that infested the place. (I had a deep-seated fear of snakes, of their furtiveness, their muscular phallic potency, the quickness of their thrust, and the terrible rending wound they left in the poisoned flesh. I always carried a snakebite kit with me—but of course I knew the rattler would never be so cooperative as to puncture my foot or hand, but instead would fasten onto my ear or eye or scrotum, thus negating the value of the kit—and during the cold weather, when there was no more than a chance in a million of encountering a snake of any kind, I’d worn leather gaiters. As soon as the heat had set in, and the snakes emerged, the gaiters had become too uncomfortable and I’d abandoned them.) I made a mark for every plant on the property, four across and a slash for five, and found that fewer than a thousand had survived the root rot, blight, and over- and under-watering that had afflicted them. Not to mention the hundreds—thousands?—that never emerged from the tough withered husks of their seedpods or succumbed to the depredations of various creatures, from the insects in the greenhouse to the bear. Nine fifty-seven. That was the figure I came up with, and that was the figure I presented to my co-workers after dinner that evening.
“Bummer,” Gesh said, and pitched a ringer to win the game. “That’s what, thirty-six dollars you owe me now, Felix.”
But this was just the beginning of our troubles, the first clear indication that we would have to revise our expectations downward. There were more to come. A week later, we began to notice that some of our healthiest plants—chest-high already and greener than a bucket of greenback dollars—were wilting. On closer inspection we saw that a narrow band had been cut or gnawed in the stem of each plant. We were bewildered. Had deer leapt eight feet in the air to vault our fences, bend their necks low to the ground, and nibble at the hard fibrous stems of the plants rather than graze the succulent leaves? Obviously not. Something smaller was responsible, some rabbity little bounding thing with an effective range about ankle-high and the ability to crawl under a deer fence. “Rabbits?” Phil guessed. “Gophers?”
It was then, with fear, loathing, regret and trepidation, that I remembered the dark scurrying forms I’d encountered that first day in the storage shed; a second later I made the connection with the rat traps we’d found scattered about Jones’s main growing area. “Rats,” I said.
We phoned Dowst. Rats, he informed us, live in the city. In garbage. A week later we’d lost upward of fifty plants, and we phoned him again. He looked preoccupied as he stepped out of the van, and I noticed that his skin had lost its color, as if he’d been spending a lot of time indoors, hunched over his notes on the virgin’s bower or the beard lichen. We walked down to Jonestown with him, squatted like farmers socializing outside the courthouse, and showed him the ring of toothmarks that had bled a vigorous plant dry in a week’s time. I watched as he ran a finger round the moist indentation and then brought it to his mouth to taste the fluid seeping from the wound. He was silent a moment, then looked up at us and announced that rabbits were decimating our crop. “They’re thirsty,” he explained, “and here you’ve got a standing fountain, seventy percent water.” He rose to his feet and brushed at his trousers. “The only thing to do is peg down the fences so they can’t get in underneath.”