Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Unfortunately, a great bleary white-haired hulk of a man in denim jacket and string tie chose that moment to lurch back and deliver the punch line of a joke with a lusty guffaw and an emphatic stamp of his rattlesnake-hide boot. The emphatic stamp caught me across the bridge of my right foot as the jokester’s audience exploded in laughter. “Excuse me,” I murmured, backing off, when I felt a pressure on my arm and swung round to stare bewildered into Savoy’s foxy triangular little face. “Hi,” she said. “Long time no see.”

  Something caught in my throat.

  “Felix, right?” she said, treating me to a blinding, full-face smile. I felt like a prisoner of painted savages running the gauntlet over a trench of hot coals—reeling from one blow, I pitched face forward into the stinging slap of the next. I watched numbly as she fished a pack of cigarettes from a tiny sequined purse, shook one free and lit it.

  “I was just going to the men’s room,” I said.

  Savoy breathed smoke in my face. “So how do you like the party?” she said, ignoring me. The smile was fixed on her lips, as empty and artificial as the smile of a president’s wife or a dime-store mannequin, but effective all the same. I didn’t want to be within six miles of her, the pressure on my bladder was like a knife in the groin, I was in trouble, out of luck and I’d begun to feel queasy, and yet still that smile spoke to me of erotic delights unfolding like the petals of a flower. “You’ve got to admit,” she said, pulling the cigarette from her mouth to nudge me and emit a chummy little giggle, “the place is shit-for-sure livelier than usual.”

  I had to admit it. But my stomach plunged like an elevator out of control and the ocean of beer I’d consumed was, according to the first law of gastrophysics, seeking an outlet. I belched.

  This was hilarious. She clapped her hands and laughed aloud, as if I’d just delivered an epigram worthy of Oscar Wilde. “Far out,” she gasped, still laughing. “I know what you mean.” Then she gave me that beaming, wide-eyed, candid look and took my hand. “Listen,” she said, “I’m over here at the bar. Why don’t you come and join me for a minute so I can buy you a drink and introduce you to a few friends?”

  Introduce me? This was the girl who had turned to me with the same smile, the same seductive eyes and insouciant breasts and announced, as if she were giving me an injection, that she had us cold. Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there. I pulled away. “No, no,” I said, “I’ve got to go, really,” knowing that she was poison, that she was out to trip me up, that her eyes were trepans and her smile a snare.

  “Oh, come on,” she said, tugging my hand as insistently as the big blonde had. “One little drink.”

  The flesh is weak, but the mind is weaker. I followed her.

  We made our way through the crowd—men in wide-brimmed felt hats, women in print dresses clutching patent-leather purses—to the only unoccupied bar stool in the place. Two women—one middle-aged, the other about thirty—flanked the empty stool like sentinels. They smiled in unison as Savoy led me up to them.

  What was going on here? I wondered vaguely, my brain numbed with love for Petra, lust for Savoy, heat, guilt, alcohol and the successive shocks of standing face to face with the handful of people in the world I most wanted to avoid. Why was Savoy, whom I barely knew, taking the trouble of introducing me to anyone? What was in it for her, for me? Was she just a friendly, ingenuous, lovely expansive teenager, or was she a conniving, hardened slut who wanted to lead me to destruction and make me betray my friends? For that matter, what was I doing here? Why wasn’t I in the men’s room, at Petra’s apartment, crouching under the bed at the summer camp?

  “This is Felix,” Savoy was saying, “the guy I was telling you about?” Telling them about? The phrase sank talons in my flesh. I saw drinks on the bar—a glass of something clear—the hard foraging eyes of the older woman, the soft inquisitive gaze of the younger. Both women nodded, and I had the queer, lightheaded sensation that the room was moving.

  Savoy was watching me. The two women were watching me. I felt like a lion or an elephant at the moment of plunging through the concealed bamboo to the pit below. “This,” Savoy said, indicating the older woman, “is Mrs. Jerpbak, and this,” nodding toward the younger, “is her daughter-in-law, Jeannie.”

  At first the names didn’t register. I rarely picked up names on a first introduction, even at the best of times. Mrs. Humpback, Mrs. Runamok: what difference did it make? But then, as the elder woman leaned toward me and mouthed “So what do you do, Felix?” the plugged channels of my brain opened up and the full horror of what was happening came home to me: I was standing amicably in a public place and trading polite chitchat with the wife and mother of my deadliest enemy. Joe McCarthy would as soon have sat down to tea with Ethel Rosenberg and Mao Tse-tung. Even worse, Savoy was obviously intimate with them—no doubt they were old family friends who watched TV and shampooed their dogs together, attended church socials arm-in-arm, observed one another’s birthdays and shared a bottomless revulsion for dope growers, pickpockets and other specimens of urban depravity. This is the guy I was telling you about, Savoy had said. It was all up. We’d been fingered. Ten years, intoned the judge.

  If I’d been able to pull myself together in the face of Sapers and George Pete Turner, now I broke down. Totally. Absolutely. Without hope or redemption. I leered down at this woman in the pink pants suit and cement hair (who reminded me disconcertingly of my own mother) and shrieked like a madman: “Ha-Ha! I did it! Yes, yes: I killed her!”

  The elder Mrs. Jerpbak’s face shrank until it resembled something you might stumble across in a root cellar. She jerked back in her seat like a whiplash victim and clutched at the neck of her blouse. “Ha, ha, ha!” I crowed, turning on the younger Mrs. Jerpbak with the exultation of the Superman, beyond civility, beyond law, beyond reason. “Killed her with my own hands, I did. And by God, I enjoyed it!”

  People began to turn their heads. Savoy dug her fingers into my arm and hissed in my face like some scaly thing prodded with a stick: “We were just talking about the rewards for turning in dope farmers, did you know that? Huh? Did you hear about that?” Her face was twisted and ugly, furious, vituperative, the face of an extortionist.

  I didn’t feel well. I snatched the glass of clear liquid from the bar and downed it at a gulp. It was gin. I gave Savoy a sharp savage look—oh, the bitch, the bitch—folded my face up like a deck of cards (the floor heaving and swaying, faces melding in a blur as if glimpsed through the windows of a hurtling train), and then turned and vomited in the elder Mrs. Jerpbak’s lap.

  Petra was sitting with Teddy and Sarah when I returned, beer-less, my bladder full and stomach empty, reeking of my own intestinal secrets and flailing through the crowd in a galloping, braying, headlong panic. “Felix,” Petra said, “where have you been?”

  I could barely speak, locked in the paranoiac’s delirium, envisioning Jerpbak calling out the National Guard to avenge the assault on his mother, looking at Petra and seeing a horde of keypunchers and savings-and-loan men in fatigues, jaws grim with a spoiled weekend, their shiny new high-laced boots trampling through the scrub outside the cabin. Hounds bayed, helicopters hovered. We know you’re in there, shithead, Jerpbak bellowed through a megaphone, and then his voice faltered and broke: Ma, he bleated, Maaaaa!

  “Felix?”

  “Listen,” I said, panting, jerking my neck wildly as beefy faces lurched in and out of my field of vision, “listen, I’ve got to take off, I mean something’s come up, it’s, uh, well it’s my mother. Her, she—”

  Petra was on her feet. “Are you all right?”

  I could think of one thing only: slamming up the road to the summer camp as fast as the Toyota would take me and burying my head in the sleeping bag. “Can you, do you think you could get a ride back to town?”

  Teddy and Sarah were standing now, too, their faces pinched with distrust: I was nobody, a stranger, an untouchable. I could have been a Hare Krishna begging change in the airport lobb
y. Petra’s jaw hardened. “Is this a joke?”

  “No, listen, I’m sorry,” I said, already backing away.

  “Felix.” There was impatience in her tone, exasperation. But there was something else, too: the hint of a plea.

  “I’ll call,” I blurted—gutshot, terrified, stung by bestial urges and the frenzy of the doomed—as I turned to run for the car.

  “Don’t bother,” Petra said.

  I was running. No time to look back. I ran with all the force of the panic rising in my chest, ran in shock, ran as if the entire Jerpbak clan, Savoy, Sapers and George Pete Turner were chasing me with a pot of tar, ran till my lungs were heaving like a drowning man’s and the burning red door of the Toyota jerked back on its hinges and I plunged the key like a sword into the hot slot of the ignition.

  I drove without thinking, fast and hard. Seventy-five, eighty, bad tires keening round the curves, my stomach churning. I hit the dirt road to the summer camp at fifty, slammed over scree, fallen limbs, the rock-hard hump that rose between the ruts like bread in a pan, and careened to a halt in a tangle of poison oak and stinging nettle. I shoved out of the car, fell to my knees and puked till I could feel my digestive tract strung out on a wire from throat to sphincter. My eyes watered, my head ached. I watched indifferently as a glossy black beetle crawled between my fingers and a party of ants discovered the sour eruption in their midst, then rose shakily, relieved the pressure on my bladder and forced myself back into the car. After grinding back and forth a dozen times, I managed to jerk the Toyota from the bushes and out onto the hardpan surface of the road.

  It was then that I noticed the other car. An old MG, slung low, the grill like meshed teeth. It was parked on the Covelo road, almost directly across from the entrance to our driveway. I put the car in neutral and backed to the edge of the blacktop for a closer look. The car was in prime condition, newly painted, not a nick on it. There was no one in sight. Where was the driver? Had the car broken down, run out of gas? Or was this some backpacking Sierra Club freak ignoring our posted signs? I sat there a moment, studying the inert vehicle in the rearview mirror, then started up the road for the cabin.

  Everything was as I’d left it—the tumbledown shack with its cloudy windows and peeling tarpaper, the gutted outbuildings, mounds of garbage. The Jeep sagged forward on its bad spring, the open hood testimony to my frustrated efforts to start it. It was six-thirty. The sun hung over the cabin as if stalled, a hushed expectant stillness in the air. Dowst wasn’t back yet.

  I felt a hundred years old. My clothes were sweat-soaked, my mouth tasted of bile. I’d left the plantation for six hours and the wrath of the gods had fallen on my head. There was no doubt about it, I thought, trudging across the moribund field to the house, Savoy meant to blackmail us. And I’d have to tell them. Tell Phil and Gesh, my partners and fellow sufferers, my buddies. Tell Dowst. Tell Vogelsang. Tell them I’d gone back on my word, tell them I’d fucked up. I stepped up on the porch, scattering lizards, and the tiniest hope flared in my scored brain: Vogelsang. Maybe he could sound her out, buy her off, kidnap her and ship her to Bolivia in a crate of machine parts. Anything was possible. After all, he was used to working miracles—and he never lost. Never. Not to anyone.

  The door pushed open with its usual whine of protest—bed, I was thinking, an hour’s sleep, that’s all I’ll need and then I can sort things out—when I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and turned to see a figure seated on the couch. It wasn’t Dowst, it wasn’t Vogelsang, it wasn’t Phil or Gesh or Aorta. I stood there frozen in the doorway, stupefied, blinking at the gloom. I saw ankle boots, skinny tie, short hair brushed straight up and back.

  “Hello, Felix,” Jones said.

  Chapter 8

  I heard the minutest sounds: the drip of the bathroom faucet, the rattle of a fly trapped against the windowpane. Tap-tap, tap. The fly threw the husk of its body against the glass—blindly, uselessly—until the rasp of those cellophane wings became unbearable. For an instant, as if in a dream, the objects of the room lost definition (shadows and shapes, shapes and shadows) and then materialized again. I saw a bag of garbage spilled beneath the stove, cobwebs, dirt, a deck of worn cards on the kitchen table, I saw Jones. The moment was timeless, eternal. Tap-tap, tap. Jones made no move to rise from the couch. Finally, the seconds swelling like blisters, he attempted a smile, the sort of smile one ten-year-old gives another before shoving him over the back of a crouching conspirator. “Don’t you remember me?” he said.

  My first thought was to close the door, trap him so he couldn’t escape. But then what? Strangle him with his tie? Get him in a headlock and wait for reinforcements? Jones. The wonder of it, the perfidy, the wicked baffling collusion of chance and circumstance: he’d known all along. I slammed the door with a savagery that shook the house.

  “No need to get upset, brother,” Jones said, dragging on his cigarette. “I just came to talk business, that’s all.”

  I measured the room in six long strides and stood over him, hands clenched at my sides. “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. My voice was strained, distant, as harsh and punchy as a drum-roll echoing across an open field.

  Jones didn’t flinch. He just looked up at me, cool as an assassin, arms folded and jaw set. I don’t give a shit, his eyes said. About you, the social contract, hard work, sweat, toil, aspiration. … I want, they said.

  I wanted, too. I wanted tranquillity, soothing pleasures in every part, an end to fear, madness and the frantic driven wide-eyed rush of the pursued, I wanted my friends to make money and the summer camp to succeed. And though I hadn’t struck anyone in anger since I was thirteen and a kid named Sammy Wolfson told me to get my dirty ass out of his mother’s begonias, I wanted to strike Jones. Right then. Swiftly, savagely, with power and immediacy and all the hammering force of righteousness. I wanted to blast him, flatten him, cripple him, concentrate all my rage and bile in one annihilating, bone-crushing blow and lay him to waste. I’d had it. I looked at Jones and knew I could kill.

  If he could read my thoughts, Jones gave no indication of it. He crossed his legs as casually as if he were lunching at the finks’ club, and then flicked the ash from his cigarette. On the floor. “All’s I want is ten thou.”

  “Get out!” I roared. I was trembling.

  Jones uncoiled himself and cautiously rose from the couch. We were standing two feet apart. “You want to fight?” he said. “I’ll fight you, motherfucker.”

  This was it, the project gone to pot, the wolf at the door, violence and criminality. “Get out,” I repeated, senselessly, and my voice dropped with resignation: there were no more words.

  “Hit me, man,” Jones said, backing off a pace. “Go on. But I’ll walk straight into the Willits police station and collect a thousand bucks for turning you guys in. You like that?”

  I didn’t like anything. I didn’t care. I cocked my fist.

  Just then, salvator mundi, there was the sound of a car in the field outside, and Dowst’s van eased into view beyond the window. We watched silently as the van jerked to a halt in a maelstrom of dust and Dowst emerged in shorts and sandals, looking as if he were on his way to a croquet party. Jones exhaled a cloud of smoke and eased himself down on the arm of the couch. “The other partner, huh?” he sneered. “Let’s let him in on this, too.”

  Dowst came through the door with a sack of Santa Rosa plums, two bags of ice and a big-toothed companionable grin. When he spotted Jones slouching there against the arm of the couch like a delinquent outside the principal’s office, he stopped dead a moment, as if afraid he’d entered the wrong house, then continued on in and set his burden down on the kitchen counter. His face had flared briefly—with surprise, passion, outrage—and then fallen in on itself like a white dwarf. Now he stood there at the counter, his mouth puckered in a lower-case o, struggling for some reason to replicate the call of a familiar woodland bird.

  “Jones,” I said.

  “Jones?”

  “The famous d
ope farmer,” I said. Jones grinned. “He’s here to blackmail us.”

  “All’s I want is ten thou,” Jones said, replaying a tape.

  I watched comprehension filter into Dowst’s face, and then I watched him get angry (it began with his ears, which flushed the color of spiracha chilis, as if they’d been tweaked, and then seeped into his face, settling in a tight intransigent line across his lips). “We’re busy here,” he said. “We’ve got no time for leeches. As Dowst waxed, I waned. I found that my own anger had dissipated, choked on itself like the mythical beast that swallows its own tail. All I felt now was despair.

  Jones ground out his cigarette on the arm of the couch and then adjusted the knot of his tie. “You’re busy,” he mocked. “Well, so am I. So’s the sheriff. He’s busy looking for assholes like you.”

  “We know about you,” Dowst said. He was puffed up with self-righteousness now, the Yalie remonstrating over a trick question on a botany quiz. “You were busted last summer.”

  Jones shrugged. “Then they’ll know my information is reliable, right?” He pushed himself up from the chair arm and moved past me toward the door. “Look,” he said, pausing at the doorway and glancing from me to Dowst, “I’m not asking, I’m telling you. Ten thousand bucks. Cash. You don’t give it to me, I’ll have a talk with the sheriff.”