Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Phil was waiting for us amid the plastic ferns in the hallway-cum-lobby of the Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital. At first I didn’t recognize him. He had his back to us, and he was slumped in a burnt-orange imitation-leather easy chair, thumbing through a twelve-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest. An old man, so wasted his flesh looked painted on, dozed in a wheelchair beside him, while a thick, stolid, broad-faced woman who might have been Nina Khrushchev’s cousin from San Jose sat directly across from him, stolidly peeling a banana. I stepped through the main door, Petra at my side, and took in the scuffed linoleum, battered gurneys, the pine desk, which now bore a placard reading “Receptionist,” the little group ranged round the cheap furniture and plastic plants. Nina’s cousin gave us a brief bovine glance and then turned back to her banana. I saw the nodding old man, I saw the back of Phil’s head (which was not Phil’s head at all, but the shorn and gauze-wrapped cranium of some stranger, some poor unfortunate from whose afflictions one instinctively and charitably averts one’s eyes). “Maybe he’s still in his room or something,” I said, steering Petra toward the receptionist’s desk.

  Gone was the sour night-nurse. In her stead, a motherly type beamed up at us, dispensing smiles like individually wrapped candies. “May I help you?”

  Beyond her, the emergency room stood empty, no trace of the kid’s bloody passage. “Phil Cherniske,” I said, with an odd sense of déeAjéaG vu that took me back to the Eldorado County jail. I’d phoned the hospital from Petra’s apartment half an hour earlier, and Phil had told me he was all right—a little sore, that was all—and that he’d meet me in the lobby at two. It was ten after. “He’s due to be discharged?”

  She gave me a peculiar look, a web of creases suddenly emerging to snatch the smile from her lips. “But he’s right over there,” she said, indicating the trio among the ferns.

  Petra and I turned our heads in unison, the old man in the wheelchair woke with a start and shouted something incoherent, Nina’s cousin tucked the nether end of the banana in the pocket of her cheek and Phil looked up from his magazine. “Phil,” I blurted, my voice echoing down the corridor, “over here.”

  He stood. Pale as a fish, dressed in his soot-blackened jeans, greasy workboots and a pale green hospital gown that fell away in back to reveal bandages upon bandages, he looked like an invalid, a refugee, one of the homeless. They’d shaved the crown of his head, and he wore a listing slab of sticking-plaster and gauze on the left side as if it were a jaunty white beret. I crossed the hallway and gave him the Beau Geste hug, gingerly patting his bandaged shoulders with my bandaged hands. “Christ,” I said, stepping back, “you look terrible.”

  Phil’s stubborn eyes had come into alignment, and he was surveying me head to foot with a tight sardonic smile. I was wearing the punctuated sneakers, my beat pants and a Boy Scout shirt of Petra’s that was so small it looked like a bib. And my bandages, of course. “You don’t exactly look like the Barclay man yourself, you know.”

  “You are all right, though, aren’t you?” I said. His right arm was taped and bound, his chest, back, shoulders; where a tongue of flesh protruded from beneath the gauze, it was rough and raw, as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it.

  Phil shrugged. “I’ve got to change the bandages once a day and rub this shit that looks like green toothpaste …” He broke off in mid-sentence. A look of bewilderment had come over his face, and he was gazing beyond me at Petra as if she were a cross between La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Dragon Lady.

  I turned and slipped my arm round her waist. “Phil,” I said, “this is Petra. Petra, Phil.”

  Phil shook her hand numbly.

  “Who the hell are you?” bawled the old man in the wheelchair, glaring at the wide-faced chewing woman. She’d been sitting there, motionless, staring off into space and absently turning the banana peel over in her hands as if she were molding clay. “You,” the old man raged. “Fat face. What the shit, piss and fuck do you think you’re doing in my bathroom?”

  The woman looked alarmed, terrified, as if she’d been denounced in a purge and was facing a howling mob. She rose to her feet, gathering up a handbag the size of a pig’s head and looking wildly around her, as we moved off down the hallway, away from the commotion. Phil was giving me an are-you-crazy-or-what look, the look of a conspirator betrayed, a look of disbelief and mortal offense. I ignored him.

  We passed through the double doors and out into the sunshine. I was holding Petra’s hand, couldn’t seem to stop touching her in fact. I’d never in my life felt better. “I told her everything, Phil,” I said.

  He stopped short. Petra attempted an awkward grin; I put on my sober, prisoner-in-the-dock expression. We stood there in the driveway for a long moment, the three of us, facing one another like footballers in a huddle. I watched as Phil absorbed the news, watched as his lips and eyes tried out one expression after another, sorting through responses like ties on a rack—he looked like a stand-up comic trying to play Lear, Cordelia and the Fool simultaneously. Finally he just dropped his shoulders and gave us a bald-headed, green-gowned, wild-eyed, gap-toothed smile. “At least you didn’t tell the Eyewitness News Team … or did you?”

  The caféeA Petra chose for breakfast/lunch was, of course, the very one in which I’d had my first paranoid episode, the one in which I’d conjured the specter of Jerpbak and gone into ataxic shock while Phil blithely related the adventures of Bors Borka, inter-galactic hero. That was back in April. I hadn’t been near the place since. Now, as I swung the Toyota into the parking lot and nosed up to the cinder-block foundation between the inevitable pickups and dusty Ford sedans, I felt the slightest tremor run through my digestive tract. Phil was rattling on about hospital food, oblivious as usual. “They gave me lime Jell-O for breakfast, with a little shit-smear of that fake whipped cream—you know, that stuff they make out of leftover fiberglass? For lunch it was grape Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it. I mean that was it. No bread, no milk, no meat, eggs, nothing. Jell-O.” He scratched the bristle of his head. “Maybe it’s some kind of new miracle food or something.”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Petra said. “It prevents cancer.”

  We were laughing as we ascended the front steps, grinning like fools as we stepped through the door. The place was crowded. Puffs of starched hair, cowboy hats, cigarette smoke, a rumbling clatter of cheap silverware and busy voices and the faint, countrified pulse of the jukebox. Petra was leading us past a row of congested booths to a table by the far window, when a hand reached out to grab my wrist.

  I stopped. Looked down. Lloyd Sapers was grinning up at me, a plate of runny eggs and grits at his elbow. Beside him, the massive spill of goggle-eyed Marlon, an avalanche of flesh in a T-shirt the size of a bedspread. Sitting across from him, and eyeing me wrathfully, was George Pete Turner. “Howdedo, howdedo,” Sapers was saying, the chin bobbing up and down on his neck like a rubber ball attached to a paddle. “Looks like you boys mighta had a little accident, huh?”

  Phil and Petra had stopped, too, and were looking back at me questioningly. How many times had I been through this, I wondered, watching the mock-innocent expression hang on Sapers’s face like a kite in the wind, how many times had I played the whipping boy to this crew of in-bred, shit-shoveling, tobacco-chewing rednecks? Things had changed. I’d been through the fire and my life was something new. I jerked my hand away. “What’s it to you?” I said.

  “Just asking, that’s all,” Sapers roared as if addressing the entire restaurant. A sly smirk creased the stubble of his cheeks and he licked his lips. “Just being neighborly.”

  “You want to be neighborly,” I said, leaning forward and resting my bandaged fists on the edge of the table, “why don’t you come up with some cash to cover your son’s rampage a month and a half ago? Like you promised.”

  He was glib, Sapers, chameleonlike, but I had him. His face folded like a lawn chair and he began to fidget in his seat. Marlon, who’d been lustily attacking a double Super Chili Beef B
urger in a sea of French fries, reddened and stared down at his plate.

  “Come on, Felix,” Phil said. He was standing behind me, the hospital gown tucked into his jeans, impatience hardening his face: he didn’t like Sapers any more than I did.

  Sapers was on the defensive now, mumbling something about an operation for Trudy and a stud bull with the bloody scours. I cut him off. “You owe me,” I said.

  Through all this, George Pete Turner had been glowering up at me with his wicked slanted vigilante’s eyes, no doubt privately implicating me in the disappearance of his daughter-in-law-to-be and a thousand other crimes, not the least of which was my insistence on continuing to draw breath and occupy space. Now I turned to him, straightened up and folded my arms across my chest. I felt like Shane unleashed, like Kid Lightning, hands wrapped, warming up for the main event. “And you, friend,” I said, “don’t I owe you something?”

  The question seemed to take him by surprise. He glanced at Phil and then Petra, as if for clarification.

  I was a firefighter, a hero, a lover. I looked him in the eye, two feet away, and prodded him: “Like a good shot to the side of the head, maybe?”

  “Hey-hey,” Sapers said, roaring again. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”

  George Pete was rangy, tough, hard as a knot. He was wearing a plaid shirt, a hand-tooled belt and a string tie. His eyes were the color of water vapor. He didn’t say a word.

  “Come on, stand up,” I said. “I’ll take you on right here and now, bandages and all.” I don’t know what had come over me, but I was suddenly hot with outrage, self-righteous as a preacher, vengeful as a man wronged. I was ready to fight to the death, bite the heads off chickens, anything.

  A nerve twitched under George Pete’s right eye. Plates rattled and voices hummed around us. Marlon swished the ice in his glass, Sapers was silent. George Pete suddenly became interested in the design of his napkin. “Fine,” I said, and an era had ended. I turned my back on them contemptuously, the matador walking away from a spiritless bull, and led Petra and Phil to a table in the corner.

  Something had changed. Some subtle alteration had taken place in the balance of things—I’d cut a new notch in the chain of being, and I could feel all the myriad creatures of the earth, from slippery amoebae and humping earthworms to the hordes of China, shoving over to make room like passengers on a crowded bus. As if in confirmation of this new state of things, the ancient waitress responded instantly to my merest gesture, though the place was packed. She poured us hot coffee, freshly brewed. The food came so quickly I suspected the cook of clairvoyance. It was hot, properly seasoned, tasty. The rolls were airy, the butter firm and pale. Phil and Petra discovered the common ground of sculpture and became fast friends almost instantly. When I looked up, Sapers and his party had vanished.

  “No,” Phil was saying, “I haven’t done anything in years.”

  “But you wouldn’t catch him dead without his blowtorch,” I said.

  Petra smiled. She was wearing white—a peasant blouse, embroidered gentians twining the sleeves. I watched her lift the sandwich to her mouth, pat her lips with the napkin, and then watched her smile widen like the wake of a sailboat cutting across a flashing depthless sea. When the two highway patrolmen lumbered through the door, keys clanking, gunbelts creaking, and heaved into the booth behind us, I barely glanced up.

  Chapter 4

  Unseasonable, freakish, the rains began in earnest the last week of October. I woke one morning to the sound of rain on the sheet Styrofoam of the roof—it was like the rattling of a snare drum—and to the slow steady drip of the runoff making its way through the seams and spattering the kitchen floor. At first I was elated. Like one of Noah’s unwitting contemporaries on the first blessed day of rain, I thought only of the crops standing tall in the fields, of the even, invigorating, pluvial wash laving leaves, buds, stems, percolating down to the thirsting roots. Lulled by the sweet percussion, I turned over and fell back into my dreams: there would be no need to start up the pump, I thought, not today.

  Three days later it was still raining.

  Now I woke to the hiss of it as to a pronouncement of doom, thinking of the generations of plowmen gone down, from the Mesopotamians to Virgil’s agricolae to the pioneers of the Midwest and their mechanized descendants—tilling, seeding, fertilizing and watering, waiting, praying, sacrificing to the gods—only to wake one morning to the rattle of hail or the cutting rasp of the locusts’ wings. My bed was damp, my clothes damper still. A single day’s rain was cause for celebration, a boon—just the thing to coax the buds into a final pre-harvest frenzy—but this was a disaster. Sodden, the heavy colas would pull the branches down till they snapped, the plants would die premature deaths, the buds would develop mold and wind up tasting like coffin scrapings. Where was the season of mellow fruitfulness, plumping kernels and deluded bees?

  I was making breakfast—fried-egg sandwiches with green salsa and melted jack cheese—when Gesh rumbled down the stairs from the attic like a tree dweller dropping to earth. He was wearing a hooded black sweatshirt and a pair of grease-stiffened corduroys, and he was cursing. The curses were elaborate, heartfelt, rhythmic and persuasive, and they were directed at the weather, at Vogelsang, at the Powers That Be and life in a disappointing and ultimately tragic universe. For five minutes or more he stood at the yellowed front window, hooded like a monk at prayer, cursing into the windowpane. The glass clouded over: it was cold. Once again. And of course we hadn’t laid in even a stick of wood, thinking only of the maturing sun, the crop—attenuated though it was—coming to golden fruition, money in the bank, release, the life of the city. Why stockpile wood against a winter we’d never see?

  When Gesh finally joined me at the table, he announced (yet again, litany of disaffection) that he was fed up with the whole thing. I watched as he slathered ketchup on his eggs and thumped the bottom of the salsa bottle. “I mean it,” he said, as if I’d questioned him. “Just get in the truck, drive to Tahoe and forget the whole fucking mess.”

  I sympathized with him. Who wouldn’t? I had the same feelings myself. But I was determined to see those plants harvested if I had to do it in a boat. Alone. With both hands manacled behind my back and Jerpbak circling overhead in a helicopter. It was no longer a question of money (the crop had been so decimated we’d be lucky to wind up with a fraction of even our most despairing estimate), reason (if I’d been reasonable I would have been sitting in front of the stove in Petra’s kitchen) or pride—no, it went deeper than that. Call it stubbornness, call it stupidity. I was beyond caring. Grim as the shipwrecked fanatic who survives six weeks on the open sea only to be offered rescue within sight of shore, I was determined to stick it out to the end. “Maybe we ought to go out there and check on the plants,” I said. “Or give Dowst a call.”

  “Fuck Dowst,” Gesh said. Predictably.

  A muted subaqueous glow drained the room of light until it began to feel like a dungeon. Behind me there was the steady syncopation of the water dripping from the ceiling into pots, pans and buckets. The kitchen smelled like a mushroom cellar.

  I was thinking that phoning Dowst wouldn’t be such a bad idea—especially as it would give me an excuse to drop in on Petra as long as I was in town—when Phil emerged from the shadowy depths of his room as if from the Black Hole of Calcutta. His eyes were watery and flecked with red, his bandages dirty. A joint glowed in his hand and a haze of marijuana smoke seemed to seep from his ears and cling like a phantom to the shorn crown of his head (he’d been sedating himself diligently since the fire—to ease the smart of his burns, he insisted—but changing the bandages far less faithfully). “Morning,” he said, shuffling across the room to the stove, where he fired up all four burners and held his hands out flat as if he were roasting weiners. We watched him pour himself a cup of coffee, cradle it in his hands, blow on it and take a tentative sip, watched with open-mouthed concentration, as if we’d never before seen so subtle and astonishing a feat. “W
hat about it,” he said finally, swinging around to face us. “The weather stinks, Vogelsang’s a liar and I’m the mummy’s ghost. Let’s get stoned.”

  Stoned, straight, drunk, sober: it didn’t make a shred of difference. “Why not?” I said.

  We mopped up our eggs and then huddled over the stove, glumly sharing a joint, gearing ourselves up for yet another critical decision. (We were smoking our own product now, heady stuff—shake leaves from fourteen-foot female plants with colas the size of nightsticks. The leaves were so saturated with resin they stuck to your fingers like flypaper.) We drank coffee, smoked a bit more, stood around staring off into space. Then, as if at a given signal, we shrugged into our rain gear and trundled out into the downpour to make the rounds and assess the damage.

  Outside, water had begun to collect beneath the gutted storage shed and in a wide scimitar-shaped depression in the front yard. The Jeep, which hadn’t run in a month, sloped forward in a reddish pool that already threatened to engulf the front bumper. There was no wind, no slant to the rain, no indication that the storm was moving on. Clouds clung to the earth as if strangling it, the main drive had reverted to its primitive state—i.e., it was a riverbed—and a network of parched gullies that were nothing more than scars in the dust suddenly churned with angry, braided streams. It was March all over again.

  We trudged down the road to the Jonestown growing area—the only one that ultimately produced anything—and fought our way through the dripping undergrowth to the rat-trap-strewn enclosure we’d thrown up in the vain hope of protecting our crop from the quick-toothed vandals of the wood. Our plants—what was left of them—had been doing well, flowering for better than a month now, putting out buds on top of buds. This was the climactic growth we’d been waiting for, fey, penultimate, triggered by the autumnal equinox and the declining days that succeeded it. Dowst had been busy throughout September, identifying and eliminating the male plants, foiling nature. I’d watched as he cut down one healthy plant after another—each the culmination of months of coolie labor, of digging, hauling, fertilizing, watering—and tossed them aside to decompose. It hurt. But it was necessary. Frustrated, aching, desperate for completion, the females spread themselves ever more luxuriously, the flowers swelling, growing sweeter, more resinous and potent; budding more and still more, our harvest battened on the vine.