Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The color had gone out of Dowst’s face as the gravity of the situation hit home: we were powerless. We could bait, bluster and threaten all day, we could coddle and cajole, appeal to Jones’s better nature and then pin him down and work over his ribs and groin till he couldn’t stand, but he had us. Short of murder, there was nothing we could do to stop him. Dowst looked sorrowful, penitent, deeply hurt and appalled; he looked as if he’d been punched in the wallet. “But we haven’t got that kind of money,” he said. “It’s all wrapped up in the plants.”

  “Monday. Noon.”

  “You know that,” I said. He was giving us two days. “You of all people …”

  Jones turned to me with a look of malice that made me want to wring my hands, tear out my hair and out-howl the damned in the lake of fire. “Ask Vogelsang,” he said, and the name sounded natural on his lips, the thought sensible and apposite, until I realized that this was Jones speaking, a stranger, someone who couldn’t possibly have known who was behind us … unless—picture mountains toppling into the sea, great slabs of granite shearing off and hammering the pitching waters, and you’ll have an idea of how this insight was to hit me—unless Vogelsang had been lying to us all along, unless Jones had been his man. Dowst must have had the same thought. Slap. Crash. Thud. His mouth gaped and his hands fluttered at his sides as if he’d gone into neuromuscular collapse.

  The door was open. Jones was framed in the glare from the dead yellow field and the dead yellow hills beyond. His expression was gloating, triumphant—he could have been a grand master maneuvering his bitterest rival into checkmate. I watched in a daze as he lifted his index finger in hip valediction. “Ciao,” he said, and the door pulled shut.

  I was sunk uneasily in the easy chair, simultaneously studying Vogelsang’s back, tapping my foot to a manic nine/eight beat and devouring corn chips with a compulsion that verged on frenzy. Something was about to happen, something final and irrevocable, but I didn’t know what. Vogelsang’s back (the dapple of brown and green in the jumpsuit, the undershirt of muscle rippling and contracting as he gestured with his hands and upper body, the hard black excrescence of the .44 at his side) was the center in a storm of uncertainty, a cipher, something to hold on to. I studied it as the setting sun smeared the windows with blood.

  Vogelsang was talking, talking nonstop, and we were in the midst of a crisis. The crisis. The crisis of crises. At long last, after all the scarifying feints and shuffles, after all the alarms in the night, our troubles had erupted and the hour of our sorrow was at hand. Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is perished.

  Oh, yes.

  All the principals were gathered, Dowst in his kerchief and I in my cap, Gesh, Phil, Aorta. Dowst was sitting across from Vogelsang at the kitchen table, an expression of censure and distaste ironed into his stern Yankee features. Aorta hunched beside Vogelsang in an imitation-leopardskin jacket, examining her nails with a bowed head, and—this got my heart pounding—looking scared. Propped up against the stove, his face a mask of rage—curled lip, Tatar cheekbones, bristling beard—Gesh could have been an advance man for Genghis Khan. His eyes were lidded with exhaustion and the torpor of methaqualone abuse, and the sleeves of his shirt had been cut away to reveal the cables in his arms. Phil was gone, a mere ghost of himself, stretched out on the couch behind me like a narcoleptic. He and Gesh had rolled into Tahoe at about the time I’d stepped into Petra’s shop, and they’d worked diligently at obliterating all thought of the summer camp until Dowst’s hysterical summons reached them at three-thirty the following morning. Then they climbed back into the pickup and watched the broken yellow line eat up the road.

  My hand went to the bag of chips, then to my mouth, then back to the bag: hand, bag, mouth, hand, bag, mouth. Phil’s snores were like stones dropped on a polished surface. Vogelsang’s voice rattled on. Immanent, inescapable, like beat of blood and thump of heart, the little creatures of house and wood saturated the auditory spectrum with clicks, rattles, hisses and grunts. Twenty-four hours had passed since I’d walked into the house and found Jones on the couch.

  “All I know about Jones is what Strozier told me. He must have been guerrilla farming up here—Strozier didn’t even know it himself till he came up from the city one day and saw the garbage the idiot left behind.” Psssst, psssst. Vogelsang freshened his breath. “If Jones named me he probably looked up the deed to the property and took an educated guess.”

  My hand paused at the bag’s aperture, my foot stopped drumming. I’d created half this crisis—Savoy was all my own doing—and I didn’t have a right even to open my mouth at this point. But I surprised myself. “Vogelsang,” I said. “You’re lying.”

  At first, the secret of Savoy had clung to me like a mussel to a rock, tenacious, immovable, held fast despite the crash of the waves and the suck of the tide. Reeling from the confrontation with Jones and the gallery of horrors to which I’d been subjected at Shirelle’s, I was too deep in shock even to think about my weakness, treachery and guilt, let alone confess them. For a while I even toyed with the idea of keeping the whole thing to myself. Forever. If we were busted, the fink-of-choice was Jones. Savoy? Never heard of her. I sank low in that moment, as low as I’ve ever sunk, but my better self won out. There was a moral imperative here: I was a sentry and the barbarians were creeping up on us, dirks clenched between their teeth and blood in their eyes, and it was up to me to sound the alarm. I’d already left the gate open. Could I stand by and see my mates butchered in their bunks?

  Still, confession hadn’t come easy. Just after Jones had made his exit, Dowst and I had dodged frantically round the room for half an hour or so, ritually weeping, wailing and gnashing our teeth, before it occurred to Dowst that he should (a) remove himself as quickly as possible from the scene of the crime, and (b) use the phoning of the absent partners as a pretext for that removal. He was gone for hours. The night revolved round my guilt. The house was dark, and I lay in my bed like a sacrificial victim on the block, the jetliners at thirty thousand feet screaming in my ears, each rustle of leaf or sigh of branch the dread footfall of the high priest. And then, at the stroke of some dark, forlorn hour, there came the closing rumble of a vehicle making its way up the hill. Dowst? Jerpbak? G. P. Turner and a mob of vigilantes? I didn’t wait to find out. My legs exploded beneath me and I was out the door in a bound, across the field and into the woods by the time Dowst’s headlights illuminated the trees at the far end of the front lot. It was four a.m. I hadn’t slept an instant. I huddled there in the crushed leaves, spiderwebs and squirrel shit, crying out for absolution, ready to crawl on my hands and knees up the thousand steps of the temple, ready to bare my soul and take my pricks and kicks.

  I told Dowst. (I don’t remember how I broached the subject. Lamely, I’m sure. “Uh, Boyd, uh, guess what? You want to hear something funny?”) Then, when they arrived at noon—burned out, hung over, and terminally wired—I told Phil and Gesh. Finally, when Vogelsang pulled in at five in the afternoon, I choked back my swollen tongue, hung my head and told him, too. He listened stoically, lines ironed into his cheeks. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said when I’d finished. His tone of voice was a marvel—distant, superior, lugubrious and sarcastic to the point of flagellation—a tone precisely calculated to induce writhings of guilt in its auditor. “First the thing with the CHP, and now this. You’re out of control, Felix.” He was the crestfallen coach and I the star player caught with a bag of Dexamyls in his locker. “I thought you were the rock of this project, someone I could trust. That’s why Boyd and I came to you first.” Dowst was irate. He insisted that I forfeit my share and get off the property posthaste. Gesh raged, Phil clucked his tongue. I was stupid, they said, a fool. Pussy-crazed. I’d let them down. I was a first-class schmuck, an airhead, an oaf and a poltroon. They said all of this and more, my co-sufferers and fellow peons (every time I glanced at Gesh he came up with a new insult), but
they stood by me.

  We’d waited for Vogelsang through the endless afternoon, waited as a beleaguered and vastly outnumbered army waits for reinforcements, for the order to withdraw, for the old campaigner who can turn defeat into victory. He’d marched in with a stiff back, strung as tightly as any of us, jumping at the slightest sound, but trying his best to maintain. My confession had given him a chance to take the offensive, but when we’d exhausted that ground and turned back to Jones, he’d begun filibustering. He was selling and we weren’t buying. Confusion, panic and the withering fire of recrimination assailed us, we beat our breasts, shrieked in one another’s faces. Accusations flew, tempers flared. We cursed one another, raged and receded, plotted wildly, imagined untold horrors and parceled out blame.

  The biggest parcel was mine. I was blameworthy in everyone’s eyes, my own included. I was incontinent, unreliable, about as trustworthy as a shaggy-legged satyr at a Girl Scout jamboree. Dowst was culpable, as far as Phil, Gesh and I were concerned, for having failed to come up with sufficient seedlings and to plan for a host of contingencies—from root rot to rodents to the birth of Jerpbak—but he was absolved from blame in the current crisis. Vogelsang was unanimously guilty—of duplicity and un-derhandedness, of failing to shield us from harsh eventuality, of having walked into my living room on that rainy winter’s night. There were two innocents among us. Oh, they could have dug more holes or killed more rats, but at this point they were nothing more than aggrieved victims.

  Now, the sun dipping behind the ridge and bringing us that much closer to the hour Jones had named, one of those aggrieved innocents spoke up. “Felix says you’re lying, Herb,” Gesh growled, his voice the ominous rumble of some cave-dwelling thing, some bear or wolverine roused from hibernation.

  The filibuster had stopped cold. Vogelsang looked tense, shifty, he looked like a perjurer tripped up on the witness stand, he looked like a liar. “I’m not,” he said. “Trust me.” And then he was off again, as if afraid to stop talking, reassuring us, marshalling arguments against our quitting, admitting that things had come to a dangerous pass through my irresponsibility and other factors beyond his control, but reminding us that nothing had happened yet and insisting that he would do his fixer’s best to right the cart. Or something like that. I remember only that he used the orator’s stratagem of exaggerating the adversary’s guilt and opposing it to his own innocence, and that he finished by assuring us that he would ferret out Jones and Savoy and see what he could do. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of them.”

  Take care of them? I thought. What was he going to do— buy them off? Cut out their tongues? Run them down in his Saab? Take care of them. He’d promised to take care of us, too.

  “Jones,” Gesh repeated. The name was a summons, a challenge, a kick in the face. He was leaning forward now, his fists clenched, his eyes swollen till they looked like cueballs. “You’re lying, Herb. You’re shit-faced with it.”

  “Christ, stop bickering,” Dowst snapped, leaping up from the table. “The police could be at the door any minute. I say we harvest what we can and get out now.”

  I could see it coming, see it in the way Gesh shifted his weight forward and swung away from the stove, and though I hurled myself out of the armchair, I was half an instant too late. There was a thud as Dowst hit the wall, a muted cry from Aorta and then the wet brutal slap, as of a canoe paddle brought down on the surface of a still lake, as Gesh caught Vogelsang across the cheekbone with six months of rage and frustration. It was a lurching, graceless blow, and Gesh staggered forward under his own momentum, fist, arm, shoulder and chest describing a single arc that brought him and Vogelsang to the floor in a deluge of flesh. The table leapt, the chair splintered. Coffee mugs skipped across the linoleum. Vogelsang was on his back, hugging Gesh in a lover’s embrace, cords standing out in his neck, jaw clamped, eyes feral and frightening. Gesh fought for purchase. “Motherfucker,” he spat, over and over, as if it were a battle cry.

  They were scraping across the floor, hugging each other, the shuffle of hands and feet like a chorus of sweeping brooms. Gesh was breathing hard, grunting, cursing; Vogelsang grappled in silence. By now Dowst had recovered from his initial shock and was leaning over the combatants like a referee. “Knock it off!” he shouted, as if it could have the slightest effect. “Come on, break it up!” Feet churned over the floor, the end table went down. Aorta had backed up against the far wall, Phil looked up groggily from the couch. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there, trembling, caught up in the killing violence, watching Gesh hammer at Vogelsang and wanting both to wade in and separate them and to let it go on. Vogelsang was down. The untouchable, the serene, chief god of his own pantheon and victor of every contest he’d ever entered. He was down, and something moved in me with every blow.

  It’s hard to say exactly how it happened. Gesh was on his knees, swinging mechanically, Vogelsang struggling to ward off the blows and Dowst leaning forward clumsily to snatch at Gesh’s collar like a teacher in the schoolyard. Then suddenly Vogelsang was free and scrambling to his feet while Dowst hit the wall again and Gesh rose from the floor like a wounded bear. “Gesh!” I shouted, and I understood in that instant that I was cheering him on, goading him, backing him, calling out his name in partisanship and affirmation as the ranks of hometown fans call out the single name of the champion stepping up to bat. For them. For us. Gesh moved forward, huge, the street fighter, the brawler, blood on his knuckles.

  I glanced at Vogelsang. His face showed nothing. His right eye was swollen and there was a thread of blood at the corner of his mouth. The .44, swift death, steel in an arena of flesh, clung to his hip. He ignored it. Instead, he cocked his open hands in the kung fu pyramid and stepped forward.

  “No!” I shouted.

  “Vogelsang!” Dowst called.

  It was so quick. So quick I barely saw it. Gesh swung, Vogelsang parried the blow and caught him twice in the throat with the flat of his hand and then struck him in the groin with an exploding foot. As Gesh pitched forward, Vogelsang’s knee went to the small of his back and I could hear the chiropractor’s crack as he jerked Gesh’s head back in the Montagnard death grip. And then, before I could realize what was happening, Phil was up off the couch with the misaligned .22 in his hand and I was flinging up my elbow to deflect his aim—too far, this had gone too far—when we all stopped dead at the sound of Aorta’s voice.

  She hadn’t screamed—no, it was far more chilling than that. “Oh, my God,” she said, and it cut like a knife to the core of everything we were—stark, animal, squeal of bushpig, howl of monkey—and we understood somehow that the words had no reference to the silly morality play we were enacting. We looked up—all of us, even Vogelsang, even Gesh. Looked up and saw that there was a face in the kitchen window, framed against the darkening sky. Round and huge, moonlike, a face, watching us.

  PART 4

  Harvest

  Chapter 1

  The fire put things in perspective. It came like a judgment, singeing, cleansing, burning with a pure, fatal, almost mystic candescence, eating away at the old growth of our baited lives to make way for the new. Immediate, deadly, it put us back in touch with ourselves. If we’d sat around the stove on a rainy spring night and traded tales of cheating death, now we fought for our lives. We burned. Inhaled smoke, rubbed our eyes raw. We dropped into the inferno and emerged again. Singed. Cleansed. Alive.

  It was a stifling, bone-dry night in early October, a month from harvest (with hope, fear and a nod to the demons, we’d chosen my birthday, circled in black on the apocalyptic calendar, for the day we would reap what we’d sown). Gesh was gone, damping his inner fires in the anodynic embrace of Tahoe Nelda, and Phil and I were sitting up late—well past midnight—drinking big glasses of vodka and tonic, smoking pot and playing pitch. The fuel in the ancient Coleman lantern was burning low. I shuffled the cards. All the world was as hushed as if it were about to plunge into eternity.

  Phil took the bid,
and I could tell he had a killer hand by the way he let his eye wander casually over the room (he was contemplating the appointments, struck with the smart conjunction of couch, armchair and splintered end table, cards the furthest thing from his mind). He threw the queen of spades (the son of a bitch, I knew he had the king and jack back there, too), just as the lamp began to flicker. “Damn,” he said, raking in my deuce and slapping down the king. The light was fading fast. I studied his king for a long palpitating moment, as though debating the loss of another point card, and then with a grin laid down the ace. Of spades. “I’ll get it,” Phil said, jumping up to refill the lantern. “Make me another drink, will you?”

  I got up and shuffled to the cooler in darkness as Phil fumbled for the flashlight, snatched the lantern from the table and hurried out the door. Ice. I pawed around, dropped some cubes in a pair of fresh glasses and felt the house rock gently as Phil thumped across the porch. CAUTION: DO NOT REFILL WHEN HOT, warned the inscription on the base of the lantern. I poured from bottles. Glug-glug-glug. Outside were the stars, the trees, the endless blanched hills. I settled in the darkness, drink in hand, and listened to the slow weary moan of the storage shed door as it pulled back on its hinges.

  In August, I never thought I’d see September on the farm, let alone October. Any shred of hope I may have nurtured after the earlier disappointments—the reemergence of Jerpbak, my confinement to the property, the ongoing decimation of the crop—was dashed by the leapfrogging catastrophes of that nightmarish two-day period at the end of the month. In the space of just over thirty hours I’d managed to rearouse the viper’s pit of the Bum Steer, alienate Petra, sully Jerpbak’s mother, feel the pinch of Jones, witness the eruption of physical conflict between my partners and experience the onset of cardiac arrest in the terrible moment in which Aorta had gasped and I looked up to see that leering face in the window. Was ever man so beset by demons? I was ready to hang it up, flay myself through the streets, run to the authorities and turn myself in: I saw that face in the window and knew we’d reached the end. But here it was October, and we were alive and well and unincarcerated, and looking forward to reaping not thorns but dollars.