Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  We’d been spared. For the moment, at any rate. The great jaws had come near, gaping so that all we could see was the darkness within, and then they’d rushed on by to gobble up some other luckless creature while we bobbed helplessly in the wake. August had left us with two choices: run or stay. If we ran, we would take next to nothing with us, the plants having barely begun to bud. If we stayed, we faced loss, disorder, sorrow and ruination. We stayed. Through inertia more than anything else. We were stuck in gear, crushed by indecision and apathy, unable to throw down our shovels and hoses no matter what the cost. Like the mule that goes on pulling its cart after the muleskinner drops dead of sunstroke, we went on. Out of necessity. Out of boredom, fatigue, confusion. Out of habit.

  It was in this state that we awaited Jones. We waited through that long Tuesday, Phil, Gesh and I (Dowst and Vogelsang had vanished, of course), waited grimly, heroically, waited like prisoners on death row. Jones wanted ten thousand. Between us we had sixteen dollars and forty-two cents. Noon came and went. No Jones. We were puzzled, anxious. Had he gone to the police after all? Had he forgotten the whole thing? Had he died and gone to hoods’ heaven? Night fell. We sat in darkness so we could see him approaching. We emptied half a gallon of vodka. Gesh smoked two packs of cigarettes. Jones didn’t show. By the third or fourth day the tension began to ease, and we forgot him for minutes at a time as we went about our chores and fought the tedium with the usual round of drinks, bombers, cheap paperbacks, tortured naps, horseshoes, Monopoly and cards.

  A week after the appointed date, we were jolted from our postprandial torpor by the throaty roar of a foreign car negotiating the hill. I looked into my co-workers’ eyes and saw fear, despair and resignation. We shuffled outside and stood in a grim knot on the porch. We weren’t running. I chewed my lip and watched the trees for the first heartless red flash of Jones’s MG. Phil began to whistle tunelessly. As the sound of the engine grew closer, I began to whistle, too. Oh, Susannah, I whistled, don’t you cry for me, but then Vogelsang’s Saab rounded the corner and lurched into the field, and I felt as if I’d been resurrected from the dead.

  Unfortunately, the appearance of Vogelsang’s Saab did not necessarily indicate the appearance of Vogelsang (though we didn’t realize it at the time, he’d already paid his final visit to the summer camp). Aorta was alone. We watched as she slid out of the car and made her sinuous way toward us, a flat white envelope clutched in her hand. “Hi,” she said, her face as expressionless as the late Mao Tse-tung’s. I saw that she’d dyed her hair anew: a two-inch azure stripe now ran from her brow to the nape of her neck, giving her the look of some bush creature, some weirdly striped antelope or prowling cat. “Vogelsang said to give this to you.”

  “Where is he?” Gesh demanded. “What’s he doing about all this shit that’s coming down?”

  “Jones never showed,” I said.

  She glanced up at me, then focused on the crumpled Pennzoil can at my feet. “We know,” she murmured. “Read the letter.” And then, as if she were messenger to a colony of lepers, she turned to hurry off before we could contaminate her.

  I tore open the envelope, which bore my name across the front in the blocky misaligned characters kidnappers clip from magazines in gangster movies. The letter inside was pasted up in the same way:

  Felix: I have contacted J., having found his address in the court record for his arrest. He will not bother us further. I was able to bargain him down to $5,000, which I paid him in cash. The money, of course, is a debit against out net earnings, and will have to be deducted from our respective shares.

  The other problem, the problem of S., has I think been resolved, and far less painfully (see enclosure).

  The Fates are smiling on us, yes?

  Yours

  V.

  Phil and Gesh read over my shoulder.

  “Five thousand bucks,” Phil said. “Ouch.”

  “I’d kill him for five hundred,” Gesh muttered, and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to Jones or Vogelsang.

  “What enclosure?” I said.

  The car door slammed. Vroom, the engine turned over with a low sucking moan. Vroom-vroom. I glanced up, noting absently that Vogelsang had removed the license plates, than bent for the crumpled envelope. Inside, equally crumpled, was a newspaper clipping. LOCAL GIRL MISSING, I read. Savoy Skaggs, 17, a June graduate of Willits High School and a resident at 1990 Covelo Road … No, it couldn’t be, I thought, the moment poetry, sweet as revenge, victory, the beatific light that shines on the darkest hour. … no leads … investigating the possibility … Of course, of course. She’s run off to consort with Eugene, suave and irresistible offshoot of G. P. Turner, the gentleman pugilist. I pictured her hitchhiking to Wiesbaden, thumb out, skirt hiked, sick to death of being a conniving country bitch and bar slut, hastening to marry off her little mangoes before they rotted. Love conquers all.

  My comrades were frowning over the letter. The Saab had begun to creep forward. “Hey, look at this!” I shouted, nearly whooping with the joy of it and waving the newsprint like a flag at a parade. But then I stopped cold: investigating the possibility of foul play. Foul play?

  Suddenly I was running. “Stop!” I shouted. “Wait up!” Aorta was still in first gear, taking it easy over hummock and hump, but picking up speed. Something snatched at my foot. I went on, shouting, waving my arms. I caught her as she was swinging onto the road.

  There was a whine of brake discs, the car humped forward and then back, dust rose. Aorta looked alarmed. “What? What’s the matter?”

  I thrust my face in the window, dripping sweat. “Vogelsang.” I gasped, lungs heaving, air too thick to swallow. “He didn’t have anything to do with this? He didn’t …?”

  Aorta’s face was white, ghoulish, the eyes sunk deep in her head. Zombies, I thought. Murderers. Kidnappers. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

  Exhaust bit at my throat, dust settled on my forearm. I noticed the license plates on the seat beside her. “Savoy, Vogelsang wouldn’t have, have done anything, would he?”

  She made a heroic attempt at working incredulity into her face, slash eyebrows lifting a degree, eyes fighting for the ironic glance. “Don’t be silly,” she said, her voice tinny as a party horn. She goosed the gas pedal. “Of course not,” she said, eyes forward, and then she popped the clutch and shot off down the road. I stood there, inhaling dust that tasted like ashes and wondering just how much all this would redound to my future happiness and well-being.

  Then there was the face in the window.

  It was a large face, pale and childish, tapering at the brow and expanding like a prize eggplant in the region of the jowl. Above, there was a bristle of close-cropped hair and a long-billed cap; below, a congeries of chins. When I recovered from my initial shock, I realized that the face belonged not to a sheriff’s deputy, spare extortionist or special investigator from the DEA, but to our own witless, puerile and very likely subhuman neighbor, Marlon Sapers. Who else?

  “Oh, my God,” Aorta had said, and we’d frozen in our worst moment, the moment of our dissolution and grief. Vogelsang had Gesh in a lethal chokehold, I was wrestling the .22 from Phil, Dowst was shouting, Aorta gasping, garbage climbed the walls as if it were alive and chaos roared in our ears. Phil was the first to react. He swung the rifle around like a skeetshooter and took out the upper left panel of the window as neatly as if he were potting a clay pigeon. Pow! The face disappeared from the window, Vogelsang sprang up as if he’d been scalded, Gesh struggled unsteadily to his feet, Dowst hit the floor. Looking pleased with himself, looking as if he’d just solved the better portion of the world’s problems in a single flamboyant stroke, Phil lowered the gun. It was then that I made the association between those fleshy befuddled features and Sapers’s son and heir, and I called out his name in shocked reproof. “Marlon!” I cried. “You come back here!”

  The next thing I remember, Vogelsang and I were crashing through the scrub behind the house, pursuing Marlon. What we inten
ded to do with him once we caught him was a question that begged further consideration. We didn’t stop to consider.

  To his distress, Marlon was not built for flight. Clumsy, lumbering, reeling from the shock of discovery and rattled by the deadly crack of the gun, he lurched blindly through the brush, heading first in one direction, then another. We caught up with him between the storage shed and the propane tank. Perceiving our closeness, he turned at bay, a frantic, crazed, trapped-beast sort of look in the eyes that loomed huge behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Go away!” he screamed, his body shuddering under the force of conflicting impulses and aberrant emotions. “Leave me alone!” I pulled up short, half a dozen feet from him, but Vogelsang, caught up in the chase and the bloodlust of his clash with Gesh, dove for his legs like a tackier.

  If he could have paused to think things out or had he been a fraction less keyed up, I’m sure Vogelsang would have acted differently. As it was, he saw almost immediately that he’d made a mistake. A grave mistake. Marlon let out a shattering, high-pitched, psychotic shriek—the shriek alone enough to commit him to Mattewan—and flung Vogelsang from him as if he were made of sawdust and paper. Then he turned to me. Vogelsang lay in the bushes, stunned, birds flew cursing into the trees, the sky darkened. Marlon was in a rage. He stamped his feet and shrieked again, pounding his fists up and down like pistons. I backed up a step. “Marlon,” I said, trying for a reasonable, soothing tone. “No one wants to hurt you.”

  “You do,” he choked. “You don’t like me.” There were beads of sweat on his face, he was turning color—his usual chalky pallor giving way to the angry swollen red of a sore about to burst—and his eyes jerked around the perimeter of the glasses like fish trapped in a sinking pond. Here was the psychopath, the disturbed adolescent who’d nearly crushed his grandmother after she’d scolded him, the inhabitee of the padded cell at Napa State. “I know you,” he blubbered, his voice so constricted it sounded like the hiss of a deflating balloon. “You, you hollered at me!”

  The great reddening hulk of him was awash in inflammatory chemicals, burning secretions from bad glands. His teeth chattered, his neck foundered on its chins like a ship going down. I backed up another few steps, poised to run, when suddenly he let out a terrible scourging shriek, bent low, tore up a bush the size of a bale of hay and heaved it at me. Branches scraped my chest, roots, dirt, I felt something wet at the corner of my mouth. When I looked up, Marlon was spinning round as if in a game of blindman’s buff, dust beating about his frantically churning legs, a high choking whinny of rage and terror stuttering through his clenched teeth. Suddenly he lurched off, erratic as a drunk, all thought of fleeing subsumed in the peremptory urge to nullify his immediate environment, to beat the visible world to dust. Before him stood the propane tank, big as a submarine. He never hesitated. Just lowered his shoulder and galloped into it, pounding it repeatedly until it fell from its cinder-block stand with a single deep booming reverberation.

  I didn’t know what to do. We’d set him off, and he was unstoppable. Vogelsang didn’t look as if he had any ready solutions either. While Marlon was distracted by the propane tank, he’d dodged out of the way, holding his side. Now he stood at a discreet distance, looking dazed and helpless, as Marlon turned his attention to the storage shed. Huge, savage, amok, Marlon reared back and hit the side of the building with the force of an artillery shell, and I heard something give, the brittle snap of stud or beam. Then he began pummeling the weathered panels with his fists and forearms until he’d managed to punch a hole in the wall. Then again and again, tearing at the hole, his fists bleeding, face warped with hatred and anguish, the ancient flimsy structure rocking on its foundation. He was awesome, brutal, mindless, King Kong hammering dinosaurs into submission. “Marlon!” I shouted over the clamor. “How about a Coke?”

  No response.

  “A Mars bar?”

  Nails screamed, boards wheezed. A plank tore loose and flew into the field.

  It had begun to look as if he would reduce the entire lodge to splinters when there came a sharp imperious roar from the ravine at my back. “Marlon!” the voice boomed, deep as the rumble of ruptured earth, hard as a wall of granite. “You stop that now!” I turned my head. There, blasting up out of the thicket like Grendel’s mother was the biggest woman I had ever laid eyes upon—not your typical fat woman or bearded lady, but a monument to flesh, twice the size of the shot putter for the Soviet women’s team. Or for the men’s team, for that matter. Trudy Sapers. I didn’t need an introduciton.

  Neither did Marlon. As enraged as he’d been an instant earlier, as frenzied and disturbed and out of control, he now shifted gears, suddenly caught up in a new paroxysm of blind, destructive, mother-mortifying fury. His jowls shuddered convulsively, he stamped and raged in full tantrum, put the great log of his sneakered foot through the wall. But his mother knew him too well. On she came, six-two at least, five hundred pounds or more, moving across the field with a purposive grace, with a mammoth, unimpeachable dignity, undaunted in an ankle-length dress the size of an open parachute. She took hold of him by the upper arm and firmly but gently, almost tenderly, threw him to the ground and sat on him.

  There was nothing to say. In the face of such a fit and so monumental an act of melioration and tenderness, Marlon’s voyeurism seemed hardly worth mentioning. I stood there awestruck through a long aphasic moment as Marlon’s breathing gradually became easier and Sapers himself emerged from the bushes behind me. He could have been emerging on a battlefield. Vogelsang was still cradling his ribs and I was licking blood from the corner of my mouth, there were three jagged rents in the face of the storage shed, and the propane tank lay on its side in the bushes like a beached whale.

  “Heh-heh,” Sapers said, and he spat nervously. “Heh-heh. My apologies about all this, boys. No harm done, I hope. Heh-heh.” He spat again, the stream of tobacco juice like some part of his anatomy, a coiled brown tongue lashing in and out as if to test the air before each breath. “Ohhhh, don’t you worry a bit, I’ll pay for the damages, a course.”

  Vogelsang stood off in the brush, looking dazed. His eyes were shrunken with pain. I saw him wince and snatch at his side when he lifted his hand in a gesture meant to reassure Sapers.

  Phil, Gesh, Dowst and Aorta were peering down from the shattered kitchen window, mouths agape, as stunned and bewildered as tourists witnessing bizarre rites in the heart of a savage and little-known region. I was feeling bewildered, too, as if my life had somehow become confused with a Fellini movie.

  “So,” Sapers roared, startling me, “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to meet my wife?”

  And thus the menace had withdrawn, retracting its claws as suddenly as it had shown them: Jones, Savoy, the face in the window. Days passed, weeks. We went about our business like blind men, like drudges, the sky didn’t fall, the earth didn’t tremble and the cells at the county jail remained as recondite as the tunnels beneath the Potala. We licked our wounds, drew a deep collective breath and went on weeding and watering, cooking meals, consuming vodka and hauling manure. I began to feel easier (relatively speaking, of course—think of the plummeting skydiver, his parachute tangled behind him, who sees that he will not after all be impaled on the nasty black pointed spires of the wrought-iron fence but hammered to pulp on the sidewalk instead), yet one problem still nagged at me: Petra. I wanted her, wanted her with an ache that tore at my dreams and soured my morning coffee,’ wanted her as a native of the searing plain wants the distant white-tipped mountains. And yet I was powerless to do anything about it. I couldn’t leave the property to phone her, not after what had happened, and I wouldn’t be free to see her until November. The thought was torture. Would she be there in November? Would she want to see me? I could confess to her then, of course, the plants harvested and sold and the operation wrapped up, but how would she react?

  It took me a week to hit on the idea of writing her. Phil lifted the phone book from the local Circle K and I found her
address—same as the store—and wrote her a fifteen-page epistle in longhand. The first three pages consisted of an elaborate (but witty and self-justifying) apology for my behavior at the heifer festival, and this was followed by an eight-page dissertation on my background, motives, beliefs and desires, and thoughts on subjects ranging from ceramic sculpture to Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems (from which I quoted liberally). The concluding pages marked a return to the exculpatory mode and hinted at the dark, dangerous, enigmatic and stimulating circumstances in which I now found myself, promised full disclosure in due time and concluded with a desperate plea for patience and understanding. I signed it “Love, Felix,” and gave Dowst’s Sausalito address.

  Two weeks passed and there was no answer. I wrote again. Twenty-five pages’ worth, a letter so thick I had to have Phil mail it in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. If the first missive was poised between pathos and wit, this was a howl of anguish, written out of despair and loneliness and the sting of rejection. It was demanding, insinuating, the sort of thing that convinces the addressee to move to Toledo and neglect to leave a forwarding address. I dissected my dreams, compared myself to Manfred, young Werther and James Dean, writhed on the page like an insect pinned to a mounting board and generally made an ass of myself. I even confessed that I loved her (a mistake under any circumstances), and insisted that I would change my name and emigrate if she didn’t return my feelings. The day Phil mailed the second letter, Dowst showed up with a reply to the first.

  “Dear Felix,” she’d written in a bold cursive on the back of a prestamped postal service card, “I have neither the time nor patience to play games or carry on a correspondence with an underground man. If you want to see me, see me. But please, no more tortured letters.” She signed it, “Best, Petra.”