Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Now we stood confused amid the apparent ruins of it. Raindrops tapped at our backs like insinuating fingers, water puddled the ground, streamed from our hats and shoulders. The trees drooped like old men with back problems, the fierce jungle smell of ripe pot stunned the air, raw and chlorophyllific; the carcass of a rat lay twisted and dumb-staring in a trap at my feet. None of us had been out of the house since the rains had begun, and we weren’t quite prepared for the transformation they’d wrought. Whereas three days earlier we’d been tending plants twelve and fourteen feet tall with branches arching toward the sun like candelabra, now we were confronted with broken limbs, splayed growth, the declining curve. Fully half the plants had ruptured under the water-heavy burden of the flower bracts, and all were bent like sunflowers after a frost. In the lower corner of the plot I found a six-inch cola—prime buds—immersed in a soup of reddish mud. It was as if someone had gone through the field with a saber, swiping randomly at stem, branch, leaf and bud. My thoughts were gradual. Still stoned, I looked round me in a slow pan—everything seemed to be moving, divided into beads of color, as if I were looking through a microscope. Somehow my heartbeat seemed to have lodged in my brain.

  “What now?” Phil was standing at my side, Mr. Potatohead, carrot nose and cherry tomato eyes. The rain thrashed the trees like a monsoon in Burma.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  So much water was streaming from my hat I had to turn my head and look sideways to see him. We might as well have been hooked to the conveyor track in a car wash. “This could go on forever,” he said.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Anything positive, that is.

  “So what do we do?” he said. “Wait and hope it clears up, try to harvest now, or what?”

  It was a resonant question, pithy, full of meat and consequence, the question I’d been asking myself for the past several minutes. “We call the expert,” I said.

  Half an hour later, after schussing down the driveway in the Toyota, fighting erratic windshield wipers and skirting Shirelle’s Bum Steer, Phil, Gesh and I crowded into a phone booth at a Shell station just outside Willits and phoned Dowst. I did the talking.

  “Hello, Boyd?”

  A pause. I could picture him hunching over his typewriter in a glen plaid shirt, sipping hot chicken-noodle soup and typing out his notes on the wild onion or the water wattle. “Christ, I thought you guys would never call,” he said. “What’s going on up there?”

  “It’s raining.”

  Another pause, as if we were speaking different languages and he had to wait for the translator to finish before he could respond. “Well, yes, of course. What I mean is did you get the stuff in yet?”

  “You mean the plants?”

  We hadn’t seen Dowst in a month, since he’d finished culling the crop. Just before he left, he’d strolled up to the horseshoe pit and announced in sacerdotal tones that all the remaining plants were females and that we had nothing to worry about, and then he’d taken me aside. He was wearing a sober don’t-jump-on-me-it’s-out-of-my-hands expression, partly defensive, partly apologetic—he could have been a surgeon breaking the news that he’d made a slight miscalculation and removed my liver rather than my gall bladder. “Felix,” he said, “you know we’re going to harvest a lot less than we expected. A lot less.” Yankee farmer, Yankee farmer, I thought, looking into those eyes rinsed of color through the generations of toil in the bleak rocky fields of New England. Lizards scurried in the dust, the clank of horseshoes beat at the moment like a blacksmith’s hammer. “I know,” I said. Then he shook my hand in a way that disturbed me, a way that seemed both empathetic and final. It was a scene from Kamikaze Hell or Zero Hour Over Bataan: he was bailing out. “I got that job, you know—did I tell you? At Berkeley. I start in the spring.”

  What could I say? We’d worked side by side, pitched horseshoes and played cards together, and yet I felt nothing, nothing but bitterness. My smile was fractured, inane, a grimace really. “Great,” I said.

  “See you,” he said, turning to head for his van. A woodpecker drummed at dead wood off in the forest; overhead, in the reaches of space, lightwaves bent like coat hangers as they responded to the gravitational tug of distant suns. “You’ll be back soon?” I called, thinking of the harvest. Perhaps he didn’t hear me. I remember the way the sunlight glanced off the side panel of his van as he rolled across the lot.

  Now it was raining. Gesh’s shoulders crowded the booth’s open doorway; water spilled from the upturned collar of his khaki overcoat. Phil pressed himself flat against the glass beside me. On the other end of the line, Dowst raised his voice. “Don’t you guys realize that a rain like this is going to sap the plants? You’ll get withered stigmas and the gland heads’ll wash away, which means you’re going to get one hell of a less potent harvest—you leave it out there much longer, you’re not going to get shit.”

  I found Dowst’s usage disturbing: the genitive form of the personal pronoun had shifted from “ours” to “yours.” We were asking for help, advice, for the expert judgment he’d contracted to deliver, and we were getting a brush-off. Dowst wasn’t in trouble; we were. He’d cut us adrift, lost interest. He’d written the whole thing off as a failure and had no intention of showing his face again—except to pick up his share of the proceeds. Anger rose in me like some hurtling, uncontainable force—a spear thrust, a rocket blast. “What the hell do you mean?” I said, my voice choked tight. “You’re in on this, too. You’re the so-called expert here, aren’t you?”

  At this juncture, Gesh snatched the phone from me and shouted into the receiver. “Get your ass up here, scumbag!” he roared, the phone like a throttled doll in his huge, white-knuckled fist.

  I wrestled the receiver away from him. “Boyd?” I said, but Gesh, his face like hammered tin, tore it out of my hands and screamed “I’ll kill you!” into the inert black bulb.

  “Boyd?” I repeated when I’d regained control of the receiver. “Are you there?”

  His voice was distant, cold. “Get the plants in.”

  I appreciated the injunction, but just how were we supposed to go about it? It had been apparent for some time that Dowst, Gesh, Phil and I would be on our own when it came to harvest. No one mentioned Mr. Big any more—clearly the deal was off. He only dealt with major operators, the guys who grew pot like Reynolds grew tobacco. We were nothing. Not only would we have to harvest and slow-dry the plants, we’d have to manicure the buds and peddle them ourselves. But Dowst’s expertise was essential to all this: without him we were helpless. “Wonderful,” I said, “super,” a heavy load of sarcasm flattening my tone, “but how?”

  “That’s up to you. Rent a truck or something.”

  “But what then? I mean where are we going to dry it and all?” The plan had called for giving the crop another two weeks or so to come to the very cornucopian apex of potent, fecund, resin-dripping fruition, after which we would hack the plants down and string them across the lower branches of oaks, ma-drones, etc., to desiccate in the dry seasonal winds. Meteorologically speaking, the plan was all washed up.

  There was a pause. Phil tilted his rainhat back, exposing a swath of filthy gauze; the set of his mouth, a certain redness about the lower nostrils and a roving rabbity gaze betrayed his anxiety. Gesh stared straight into the receiver, as if his eyes could hear. “What’s wrong with your place?” Dowst said.

  “My place?” The suggestion was outrageous, preposterous—he might as well have named the Oval Office or the lobby of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Hundreds of pounds of marijuana strung up like dirty wash in my apartment? In the middle of the city? How would we get it in—or out?

  Dowst’s voice pricked at me like a hatpin. “Look, I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that it’s supposed to rain for the rest of the week and you’d better get that shit in and dry it someplace.” The line crackled as if with the dislocations of the storm. “Harvest,” he said. “Now.” And then he hung up.

  Phil and
Gesh were looking at me as if I were a runner bringing news of foreign wars. “Well,” Gesh said, “what did he say?”

  Rain spanked the glass walls of the phone booth; a dank wind rose up out of nowhere to assault my nostrils. Suddenly it didn’t matter. Inspiration came, joy, uplift. All at once I knew what we were going to do, and how. But even more important was the electricity of the understanding that came with it: we were free. The project was finished, harvest upon us. All we had to do was cut the plants, pack up and turn our backs on the place. Forever. No more Jerpbak, Sapers and the rest, no more lizards and rats, heat, dust, rain, cold, no more alarms in the night or bathing in a tub fit for crocodiles, no more Dowst, Jones, Vogelsang: it was over.

  “Well?”

  I was grinning. The rain fell steadily, dropping like the curtain on the final act of a wearying and protracted drama. “We harvest,” I said. “Now.”

  Ever since the fire, I’d felt that the three of us had drawn apart in some subtle, indefinable way. We were still close—as close as any band of guerrillas under attack, as close as survivors, comrades, buddies, blood brothers—but the fire, as I’ve said, altered our perspective. As it became increasingly evident that the whole ill-fated project was a bust and that we’d sweated and agonized and given up nine months of our lives for nothing, we began perhaps to feel a bit shamefaced, embarrassed for ourselves, as though we were rubes taken in by a good but transparent pitch, as though we should have known better. The profits would be negligible, Mr. Big was an interdicted subject, the hazards mounted as the crops ripened, but it was understood among us that we would stick it out. We no longer bothered to perform calculations on the mental ledger sheet—solving for x was too unsettling. We were going to persevere, grimly, stolidly, Tess cutting sheaves at Flintcombe-Ash, Job staggering under the burden of calamity, and we didn’t want to know the score.

  And so, once united behind the myth of success—the yachts, the restaurants, the equal shares of half a million dollars—we now by necessity drew into ourselves to avoid confronting its rotten wasted core. Gesh brooded. He took long plodding walks through the fields, his fierce Slavic gaze fixed on the ground, hair in a tangle, great bruising hands wadded behind him like tissue paper. Restless, he made a twenty-four-hour run to Tahoe for pharmaceutical meliorants; exhausted, he slept twelve hours a day. He seemed distracted, cankers of rage eating at him like some alien growth, disappointment, self-reproach and the ravages of heartburn sunk into his eyes. Increasingly taciturn, cryptic even, he became the evil genius of the place, a bristling presence to whom the least gesture of day-to-day life was a wellspring of bitterness. Throw a ringer to beat him at horseshoes, draw the winning card from the deck, and he looked as if you’d run a sword through him.

  If Gesh was tangled up in himself, rootbound with frustration, Phil was the sensitive plant. For the first few days after his return from the hospital, he drifted from one room to another like a ghost, scratching idly at his crotch or the desolation of his crown, smiling little, saying less. He picked at his guitar for hours at a time (mournful single-string meanderings that sounded like lamentations for the dead), he stopped eating, chain-smoked pot; his bandages glowed in the dark. I came in from irrigating the plants or stood at the stove stirring a kettle of tuna, noodles, and cream of celery soup while Gesh glared at a tattered skin magazine and Phil gazed out the window as if he were witness to rare visions or rehearsing for the rapture. Acid emotions, short-circuited brainwaves: I felt pinched between them. “Phil, are you okay?” I asked after a day or two. No response. I repeated myself. “Me?” he said finally, as if he were one of hundreds present. “Oh, yeah, sure, no problem.”

  Finally, just as I’d begun to suspect that the flames had somehow scoured the inside of his head as well as the outer tegument, Phil roused himself to action. It was early morning, four or five days after he’d got back from the hospital, the weather sere and hot, snakes stirring, rats nibbling, rain an impossible proposition. Gesh and I were on our way back from ministering to a thirsty if depleted crop, stepping gingerly, our ears attuned to the least rustle of leaf or twig (I held the shotgun out before me like an assegai, wary of snakes and poachers alike), when Gesh grabbed my arm and dropped his voice to a tense whisper: “What was that?”

  “What?” I said, my chin the end-stop beneath the flaring exclamation point of my mouth, nose and brow. “That noise.”

  We were cutting cross-country to save time, up to our knees in dense, reptile-nurturing brush, no more than fifty yards from the cabin. “I don’t hear anything,” I whispered, hearing it. It was a hiss: faint, sibilant, saurian, nasty. I released the shotgun’s safety catch. Cautiously, slowly, with more reluctance than curiosity, we made our way to the edge of the field that lay before the house.

  What we saw was Phil. He was bent over something, his back to us, intent as a cannibal at breakfast. As I drew closer it became apparent that the hissing was not an expression of ophidian rage but rather the constant fulminating rush of burning gas: Phil was fooling around with his acetylene torch, playing with fire, shaping something. We came up behind him. Sparks flew. Rumpled, twisted, dull as dried blood, the dismal, rusted shapes of discarded machine parts lay in a jagged heap beside him like the debris of foreign wars. Phil was in the process of joining the spin basket of an abandoned washing machine to the amputated fender of a deceased Packard I’d tripped over at least sixty times since March. I asked him what he was doing.

  Behind him loomed the charred skeleton of the shed; the blackened grass fanned out around him like a stain. I watched as he steadied the spin basket with one hand and carefully drew the torch along the base of it with the other. He finished the connection before he turned to look over his shoulder at us.

  “It’s a bird feeder, right?” Gesh said.

  Phil was wearing goggles. The dirty bandages clung to him like a second skin. He could have been a downed fighter ace, injured but game, hunched hopefully over the husk of his gutted jet. For a long moment he simply regarded us as if he’d never laid eyes on us before, the blue flame spitting from his fingertips as if in some magic act. After a while, he turned back to his work.

  By nightfall a chin-high pyramid of conjoined junk rose from the ground where the greenhouse had once stood. I’d watched Phil from the shadowy interior of the cabin as morning became afternoon and the roving sun beat at his long nose and naked brow, watched as he dragged bedsprings across the stubble, caressed fenders scalloped like giant ashtrays, probed the slick bulging bellies of his objets trouvéeAs with the burning finger of his torch. He sifted through the ash and debris of the storage shed until he came up with the decapitated head of a pitchfork with its scorched and twisted tines, crabwalked across the back field like a man with bowel problems as he struggled with the gearbox of the weed-whipped Hudson that straddled the cleft of the ravine like a beached ship. He hammered, burned, melted, bent, wedged, clattered and thumped. There was noise, there was heat, creation blossomed amid the rubble, ineffable design confronted physics. When it was fully dark, Phil staggered into the kitchen to take nourishment.

  “Is it done?” I asked. My tone was buoyant, warm, shot full of enthusiasm. Phil had been a zombie since the fire, not yet dead but not alive either, and to see him snap out of it was a relief. “Whatever it is,” I added. “What is it, anyway?”

  Phil was bent over the gas burner, lighting a joint. I suppose the cannabinoids contributed in some mystical way to the purity of his vision—I was standing knee-deep in a bog and he was scaling creative Annapurnas. “No,” he said, exhaling fragrant smoke, “it’s not done yet.” Dried sweat chewed at his bandages with yellow teeth, his wild eye spun in its socket like a lacquered lemon in a slot machine. “It’s a, it’s—“ He broke off to take another hit. “It’s a tribute to us, I mean to the whole thing we’re doing up here.”

  Gesh was slumped in the easy chair, his huge bare feet splayed out across the floor. “You mean like a memorial to the dead, right?”

  “
Come on, give us a break,” I said.

  “What about the eye in the sky?” Gesh drew himself up and leaned forward. “You don’t think they’ll spot that pile of junk from anywhere in the range of five hundred to thirty thousand feet? You might as well put up a neon sign: ’Pot, a hundred and twenty dollars a lid.’”

  Phil wasn’t listening. He was spooning papaya-coconut chutney on a slice of white bread and staring off at the flat black windows as if his gaze could drive back the night and illuminate the yard. The creative fit was on him.

  It took him a week. After the second day he had to use a ladder. I went outside one morning to see how he was doing and found him perched ten feet off the ground, nesting in the crotch of his metallic aerie like some gangling unfeathered big-winged chick, the blue flame licking here and there, parts accruing. “How’s it going?” I shouted. Aloft, grinning, begoggled, he held up two fingers in the victory sign.

  Gesh bitched. Lizards began to frequent the structure’s lower verges, twitching in the dazzling light, doing short-armed pushups and yelping from soft trembling throats. Birds shat on it, rats toured its tortuous walkways like prospective tenants looking over an apartment complex. The sum of its parts, Phil’s monument grew in unexpected directions, mad, random, sensible only to the inner vision that spawned it. Twice the artist made frantic trips to town to replenish his supply of brazing rods or refill one or the other of his tanks. Aside from those two brief hiatuses, he worked from dawn till dusk, skipping meals, ignoring his chores, his comrades, the plants blooming like medallions in the fields. Frayed, the bandages whipped round him in ectoplasmic flux, his pants and T-shirts were spattered and singed, skin began to peel in transparent sheets from his sunburned nose. On the sixth day he worked late into the night, the glow of the torch dimly visible beyond the darkened windows of the cabin. On the seventh day he rested. He rose about noon and summoned Gesh and me outside. Tottering on the porch, his eyes glowing feverishly, he gestured toward the mound of welded junk with a flourish and said “VoiléaG.”