Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The three occupants of the blanket—Teddy (a little guy in racing leathers whom I took to be Sarah’s beau), Alice (a health-food nut, thin as a refugee), and a big, box-headed character with a wire-thin Little Richard mustache—smiled benevolently at us as we eased down amidst a clutter of paper plates and plastic cups, denuded ribs, puddled grease and pinto beans. I sat between Petra and Sarah, and sucked the foam from my beer. Flies hovered, the big P.A. speakers crackled, smoke spun off into the sky.

  Petra introduced me—everyone seemed to be familiar with our connection, and this pleased me—and then Little Richard said that he’d just got back from three weeks in Hawaii, tuning pianos. This led to two distinct but rapidly converging threads of conversation: the Islands and the trade of piano tuning. Sarah said she was tone deaf. Teddy said that he once swam with humpback whales off Maui. Alice looked up from a plate of shredded carrots and said that she preferred Debussy’s Etudes to anything Chopin ever did—especially when she was in Hawaii. Did the tropical air make tuning more difficult? Petra wondered. Richard tied up the loose ends neatly with an anecdote about sun bathing in Kaanapali with his tuning forks, and then turned to me and said, “So what do you do, fella?”

  These were dangerous conversational waters, and I could see the shoals and reefs prickling about me. Earlier, in the car, Petra had asked the same question and I’d begged off by saying, “You know—a little of this and a little of that.” “Sounds like a pretty evasive answer,” she’d retorted, and I’d dropped the corners of my mouth and said, “You’re right. Actually I run guns to Libya.” Now I opted for the straightforward approach. I looked Richard in the eye and told him I inspected airplane fuselages for stress fractures.

  “Oh,” he said, and then the conversation rushed on past me, expanding to touch on methods of tofu preparation, the heat, the shameless behavior of a number of people I didn’t know, and the political situation in Central America. I leaned back on the blanket, scanning the crowd for trouble, smiling amenably at Petra’s friends and whispering nonstop witticisms in her ear. And oh, yes: drinking beer. It seemed that every time I took a swallow or two someone would hand me a fresh cup. This had a two-fold effect—of relaxing my guard (so what if I ran across Sapers or one of the other yokels—they had nothing on me) and suppressing my appetite. When Petra got us a plate of potato salad and chili beans, I did a couple of finger exercises with my plastic fork and then drained another beer.

  After a while the conversation went dead, the C&W band lurched into some rural funk, and Sarah and Teddy got up to dance. Little Richard was passed out at the edge of the blanket, the sun filtering through the leaves to illuminate each separate astonishing whisker of his mustache, and Alice excused herself to go tend Sarah’s health-food stand. I thought of asking Petra to dance, but since I hate dancing, I decided against it. Instead I told her that I hadn’t meant to be flippant or to hide anything when she’d asked me what I did for a living, and sketched in what I’d been doing for the past year or so—that is, refurbishing Victorians in a slow market and reading banal, subliterate freshman papers as a part-timer at Cabrillo Community College. I didn’t mention the summer camp.

  She looked disappointed. Or skeptical. “So you live in San Francisco?”

  I nodded. “But I’m up here for the summer with a couple of friends—just to get away, you know?” “I know. Fishing, right?”

  We smiled at each other. “Yeah, well, we do actually go fishing sometimes. But mainly the idea is just to rough it, you know, get out of the city, listen to the crickets, hike in the mountains.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her, and then she dropped her head to trace a pattern in the blanket. I felt then that she saw right through me, knew as well as Vogelsang what I was doing in Willits. Lies beget other lies, I thought—now’s the time to come clean, to start the relationship off right. But I didn’t come clean. I couldn’t. I was about to say more, to get myself in deeper, when she lifted her glass and said “Cheers.”

  For the next hour or so, while the sun made a molten puddle of the parking lot and the band hammered away at their guitars as if the instruments had somehow offended them, we talked, getting to know each other, comparing notes. I learned about Petra’s childhood in Evanston, summers spent sailing on the Great Lakes, her talent for design and the first misshapen piece she’d ever fired (a noseless bust of Janis Joplin). Her father was an architect, her mother was dead. Auto accident. She had a sister named Helen. She liked green chartreuse, Husky dogs and old-time Chicago Blues. She was twenty-nine. When she was in the tenth grade, attending a private school, she’d met a guy two years her senior, an athlete, high achiever and verbal whiz. They dated. He was class president, she was secretary of the Art Club. He went to the University of Iowa, she went to the University of Iowa. They dated strenuously, lived together, got married. He went to law school, she worked (in a Kentucky-style-chicken franchise where they went through thirty gallons of lard a day). When he graduated and got a job with a firm in San Francisco, they moved to a skylit apartment on Dolores Street and she began doing ceramics in earnest. One night he told her he was bored. Bored? she said. I don’t want to talk about it, he said. Two days later he was gone. She called the law firm. He hadn’t been in for over a week. Later she heard that he was in Amsterdam, living on a barge, then someone saw him at a jazz club in Oslo. With a Danish girl. After that, she stopped asking.

  I made sympathetic noises. How could anyone—be he deaf, dumb, blind, castrated—walk out on her? I was thinking, and then realized that someone, somewhere, could be thinking the same thing about Ronnie. Square pegs, round holes.

  We drank beer. Petra stretched her legs, applied tanning oil to thighs and forearms, offered me potato salad as if it were caviar. It was hot, it was dry, there was too much dust, too much noise and there were too many people, but I hardly noticed—I gave my full attention to Petra, mooning over her like some ridiculous lovelorn swain out of Shakespeare or Lyly, ready to jump up and swoon at the drop of a hat. We drank more beer. Teddy and Sarah fumbled back to the blanket, panting and running sweat, stolidly drained their warm beers and staggered back to the dance floor. Then Petra handed me her empty cup and rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’. Would you get me another beer?”

  “Sure,” I said, reckless, foolish, drink-besotted, hurtling mindlessly toward some fateful collision. I sprang up from the blanket. We were standing inches apart. I put my arm around her shoulder and we kissed for the first time, dogs yapping and chords thumping at the periphery of my consciousness, my whole being consumed with pure urgent animal lust. “Be back in a minute,” she said, her voice soft as a touch, and I stood there, empty cup in hand, watching helplessly as she receded into the crowd.

  I looked around me. The heifer bacchanal was in full swing, heads, shoulders, torsos and hips flailing in time to the music, feet shuffling and legs kicking, incisors tearing, molars champing, throats gulping—beef, beef, beef—as the smoke rose to the sky and abandoned shrieks cut through the steady pounding din of the drums. To the left of the dancers was the barbecue pit, which I would have to negotiate on my way to the beer booth, and beyond that the appalling dark entrance of the bar.

  I began to maneuver my way through the crowd, thinking of Petra’s blue shorts and the couch at the summer camp, when someone set off a string of firecrackers and fifty hats sailed into the air accompanied by a chorus of yips and yahoos. Ducking hats and elbows, clutching the plastic cups in one hand and extending the other to forestall interference, I snaked through the mass of carnivorous bodies at the barbecue pit and was just closing in on my destination when a two-hundred-pound blonde in pigtails and a fringed Dale Evans outfit stepped in front of me and asked if I wanted to dance.

  “Dance?” I repeated, stupefied. But before I could go into my hard-of-hearing-with-a-touch-of-brain-damage routine, she jerked my arm like a puppy’s leash, spun me around and propelled me toward the dance floor.
This was no time for argument: I danced. She pressed me to her—breasts like armaments, big grinding hips—then made the mistake of releasing my hand as she fell into momentary rapture over the musical miracle of her own rhythmically heaving body, and I dodged behind a barefoot lumberjack with beard, belly and ratchetting beads, and clawed my way to the beer booth.

  The bartender had his back to me, bending to crack a fresh keg. “Two beers,” I said. “When you get a chance.” I stole a look over my shoulder to see if my dancing partner had missed me, but there was no sign of her. I was safe. I would give the dance floor a wide berth on the way back, hand Petra her beer and then suggest that we go to my place—or rather her place. Yes, that’s what I’d do. We’d been here long enough, I’d taken foolish risks, and now it was time for my reward.

  Absently, I studied the work-hardened hands of the bartender as he positioned the spigot over the cork, screwed the collar tight and rammed the plunger home. Somewhere behind me a raft of firecrackers snapped and stuttered. And then, in the half-conscious way we register minor changes in our environment, I saw that this bartender, with his sun-ravaged neck, graying hair and outsized ears, was not the good-natured cowboy of two and a half hours ago, but someone else altogether, someone who from this angle almost looked … familiar.

  Before I could make the connection, Lloyd Sapers spun around, spigot in hand, and said, “Two beers coming up.” The beer was already hissing into the first cup, yellow as bile, when he glanced up and found himself staring into my stricken face. There was a moment of shocked recognition during which his eyes fell back into his head and his lower jaw dropped open to reveal teeth worn to nubs and a lump of shit-colored tobacco, and then his face lit with a sort of malicious joy. “Well, Christ-ass, if it isn’t Ernest Hemingway. Gettin’ a bit dry up there on the mountain, hey?”

  My first impulse was to laugh in his face in an explosion of nerves, like the killer at the denouement of a Sherlock Holmes movie (Ha! You’ve caught me! Ha-Ha! Yes, yes: I did it! I killed her! Choked her with my own hands, I did. Ha! Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha! Ha!). Fortunately, I was able to stifle that impulse. What I did manage to do, after struggling to get a grip on myself, was force my face into the jocular it-wasn’t-me expression of a good ole boy caught in a minor but quintessentially manly transgression. “You know how it is,” I said, grinning sheepishly, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he roared and nearly choked on his own laughter. I watched as the level of beer rose in the second cup, already shifting my weight to turn and make my escape, when he leaned forward and said, “You didn’t bring that big fella with you, did you? The one that shoved me around?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good,” he said, dropping his voice from the usual roar. His straw hat was askew and he smelled as if he’d been dipped in used Kitty Litter. “I don’t like him,” he said confidentially, capping off the beer with a crown of foam. “The man just ain’t neighborly.”

  I hooked two fingers over the lips of the plastic cups, preparatory to lifting them from the table and making my exit, but Sapers wouldn’t release them. Held fast, I could only mumble something to the effect that Gesh was sometimes hard to get along with.

  “Ha!” Sapers bellowed. “Now that’s an understatement.” And then he snatched the beers from my grasp and swished them in the dust; “You got a couple of chewed-up cups there, friend—what’d you do, pick ’em up off the ground?”

  “No, I—”

  “Here,” he said, producing clean cups and clicking them down on the table, “I’ll fix you up with some fresh ones,” and I watched as he prolonged my agony by pumping up the keg and meticulously tipping each cup to accept a slow steady stream of headless beer. I was sweating. I closed my eyes a moment and watched a dance of red and green paremecia on the underside of my eyelids. “Here you go,” Sapers said, and pushed the two full beers toward me.

  Could it be this easy? I reached for the beers, about to thank him and go, when he ducked his head slyly, spat out a stream of saliva and tobacco juice and said, “So I hear you boys been doin’ a little gardenin’ up there. …”

  I stood stock-still, my hands arrested, like a man at a picnic who glances up from his sandwich to find a two-inch hornet circumnavigating his head. Sapers was regarding me steadily, his eyes keen and intent. I remembered that first morning in the cabin, the way he’d dropped the mask of the yokel for just an instant and the foreboding I’d felt. He was clever, he was dangerous, he bore us ill will. And I was half drunk. As nonchalantly as I could, I lifted one of the beers to my lips, took a swallow and said, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Marlon,” he said, blinking innocently, the hick again. “He says you got all these drums of water and hoses and—”

  I cut him off. “Marlon?” Illumination came in a rush: the big lumbering half-wit had been spying on us, slipping through the woods like a cousin to the bear, fingering our hoses and sniffing our plants. “You mean he’s …?” I couldn’t quite frame the words.

  Sapers looked apologetic. “Oh, listen, I hope you and your friends’ll understand—the boy’s a bit, you know,” he said, tapping a gnarled finger to the side of his head. “He don’t mean no harm.”

  “But our place is private property—we’ve got signs up all over the place.” My voice was a squeal of outrage. “Vogelsang would hit the ceiling if he heard about this.”

  Sapers spat again, then picked up my beer and took a long swallow. “Aw, come on,” he said, “it’s no big deal, is it? What have you got to hide?”

  “Nothing,” I said, too quickly. “But it’s the principle. You see, Vogelsang’s afraid somebody’ll get hurt on the property and sue him—he’s got a real hang-up about it. And Gesh, you know how Gesh is.” I shrugged. “Me, I could care less. I mean, shit, we’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Sapers was watching me like a predator, no hint of amusement in his face. “So what have you got in the ground over there anyways—sweet corn?”

  What was he doing—playing games? Making me squirm? I didn’t know what to think—maybe I was having a paranoid episode and he knew nothing at all—but at least I had the presence of mind to play along. “What else?” I said, as if in epicurean contemplation of that succulent, many-kerneled farinaceous vegetable. “Nothing but cattle corn in the supermarket, right?”

  Sapers was impassive, his face locked like a vault.

  “Of course, we’re growing other stuff, too—for the exercise, you know? Beets, celery, cucumbers, succotash—you name it.”

  Stroking his chin thoughtfully, Sapers shifted the wad of tobacco from his left cheek to his right. “The only reason I ask is because I been havin’ the devil of a time with the coons this year—for every ear they eat they spoil five. They hittin’ you pretty hard, too?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean yes. Or we didn’t know it was coons. Something’s been getting into the garden, anyway—Phil thought it was bears.” I chortled at the absurdity of it, but the joke fell flat. Something made me glance to my right at that instant, and I saw to my alarm that I was flanked by the immensity of Marlon and the wiry whiskery spring-coiled figure of George Pete Turner.

  Marlon was wearing a dirty white T-shirt maculated with barbecue sauce, in the tenuous grip of which the great naked ball of his belly hung like a wad of soggy newsprint. He clutched a two-quart plastic bottle of Safeway cola in one hand and held a red helium balloon—HEIFER HIJINKS, WILLITS, CA—in the other. When he saw that my attention was focused on him, his eyes rushed round the thick lenses of his wire-framed glasses and he giggled.

  George Pete Turner glared at me out of red-flecked eyes, then took a hit from a pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad. The last time I’d seen him he’d punched me in the side of the head. I looked from him to Sapers and then back again. “They let just about any scum in here, don’t they?” George Pete observed, staring down at my shoes.

  “Well,” I said, an easy little chuckle breaking up the mellifluous
double ls (who was I to take offense, the whole thing just a harmless little joke, a wisecrack, wit, persiflage, that’s all). I followed this with “Heh-heh” as a sort of bridge, raised my hand in a quick farewell and ducked away, abandoning the beers.

  It was at this point, nearly panicked now, running scared, that I found myself making eye contact with the big blonde in the Dale Evans outfit. Though I immediately glanced away, I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was making her way toward me through the crowd. I had nowhere to turn. Sapers behind me, the she-woman in front of me, the pit to my left and the dark portals of Shirelle’s to my right. If in such situations the hearts of heroes expand to enable them to flail their enemies into submission, tuck heroines under their arms and swing to safety via conveniently placed gymnasium ropes, then I benefited at that moment from a similarly expanding organ—that is, my bladder. All at once my body spoke to me with an urgency that was not to be denied. I took a deep breath and plunged toward the shadowy entrance of the bar and the rushing release of the men’s room that lay beyond it.

  I was met by the roar of electric fans, a clamor of chaotic voices, and darkness. After the steady, harsh, omnipresent glare of the summer sun, the darkness here seemed absolute, impenetrable, the darkness of mushroom cellars, crypts, spelunkers’ dreams. I edged out of the doorway in the direction of the bar, feeling my way through the pillars of flesh and barking drunken voices until my eyes began to adjust. The place, I saw, was packed. People pressed up against the bar, stood in tight howling groups with cocktails clenched in their hands, sat six or eight to a table tearing at ribs and hoisting pitchers of margaritas. For some reason—temperature control? atmosphere?—the curtains were drawn and candles glimmered from the tables. I stood there a moment, tentative, my shoulders drawn in, a canny old quarterback scouting the defensive line. Then my bladder goaded me and I started across the room.