Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The back of Gesh’s trench coat was soaked through. He was breathing in an odd, fitful way, his mind in the wet fields, flashing like a scythe. “We’re going to need a truck,” he said. “Something enclosed.”

  Phil was nodding in agreement.

  “Okay,” I said, “great. Just let me make this phone call and we’ll discuss it.”

  I watched as they dodged off through the downpour, hitting the puddles flatfooted and snatching at their collars. Then I dialed Petra’s number and counted the clicks as the rain drummed at the tinny roof of the phone booth.

  She was in the shop. Her voice was a pulse of enthusiasm, quick, high-pitched, barely contained. She was firing a new piece—a figure—her work was going well in the sudden absence of tourists. No, it wasn’t a grotesque, not really. She was going in a new direction, she thought: this figure a swimmer on a block of jagged ceramic waves, limbs churning, head down, features not so much distorted as unformed, raw, in ovo—she couldn’t seem to visualize the face. Weird, wasn’t it?

  “Strange,” I said.

  How did I like the rain?

  “We’re harvesting,” I said.

  Her voice dropped. “So soon? I thought—?”

  “I just talked to Dowst. This much rain is going to kill us, it’s going to weaken the crop and make the smoke a lot less potent. We have no choice.”

  A gust of wind rattled the booth, raindrops tore at the glass like grapeshot. I couldn’t hear. “What?” I said.

  “So you’re leaving, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Going back to the city.”

  “I’ll call,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  We rented a twenty-four-foot U-Haul truck and bought two hundred double-reinforced three-ply extra-large plastic trash bags and three sickles. It was getting dark by the time we introduced the truck’s big churning wheels to the riverine bed of the driveway. Gesh was behind the wheel of the truck and I was in the deathseat; Phil preceded us in the Toyota. There were no surprises. The truck staggered like an afflicted beast groaning in every joint, Gesh fought the wheel like Hercules wrestling the Hydra, I braced myself against the dashboard with both hands and feet, branches slammed at the great humped enclosure that rose up behind the cab and the wheels bogged down in mud. Six times. We took down saplings and beetling limbs with bow saw and axe, we propped up the wheels with skull-sized stones and rotted logs, we shoved, sweated and bled. Expert at this sort of thing, we managed to clear the top of the hill in a mere two and a half hours. The rain slacked off just as we rolled up outside the cabin, the clouds parted and the pale rinsed stars shone through the gap like the sign of the covenant. “Hey,” Gesh said, slamming the big hollow door of the truck and cocking his head back, “you know what? It looks like it might just clear up after all.”

  Phil and I gazed hopefully at the heavens. Just then the moon emerged, cut like a sickle, and the clouds fell away in strips. “Yeah,” I said after a while, “I think you might be right.”

  He wasn’t.

  In the morning it was raining again. Hard. The earth sizzled, the sky was a cerement, the rain heaved down brutally, retri-butively, with crashing fall and stabbing winds out of the northwest. Inside, it wasn’t much better. Brownish swill drooled from the ceiling, filling and overfilling the receptacles flung randomly across the kitchen floor, wind screamed through the planks, the sodden beams groaned beneath my feet like arthritic old tumblers at the base of a human pyramid. The house was sapped, enervated, falling to ruin. I couldn’t have cared less. If, as in some vaudeville routine, the entire place collapsed the moment we slammed the door, so much the better.

  Shivering in the early-morning cold, I eased down on the living room floor to pull on my socks and shoes. I wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table or on the couch or easy chair for the simple reason that they no longer existed—at least in the form we’d known them. In a festive mood after winning the battle of the U-Haul, we’d dismantled the furniture, feeding the combustibles into the wood stove while toasting our imminent departure with the dregs of our liquor larder (two fingers of bourbon, three of Kahlua, a faint whiff of vodka and half a gallon of soured burgundy that tasted like industrial solvent). I laced my boots to the mocking chatter of the rain, and then, hosed and shod, I sloshed my way to the stove as Gesh rambled about overhead and the decelerating rhythm of Phil’s snores indicated that he was about to emerge from the grip of his dreams.

  The kitchen was a palette of life, blooming with rank growth, with festering sludge and the primordial agents of decay. A rich blood-red fungus that apparently throve on periodic incineration clogged the stove’s jets, exotic saprophytes stippled the walls, the counters were maculated with splotches of blue-green mold from which black filaments arose like trees in a miniature forest. The smell was not encouraging. If the place had been barely habitable when we moved in, it looked now as if a troop of baboons had used it for primal therapy. I shrugged and struck a match, surveying the room for the penultimate time. Then I shoved aside the crusted kettle in which the remains of our last supper were slowly congealing, and put on the water for coffee.

  We tackled the Khyber Pass first.

  Up the precipitous slope, stumbling over mud-slick streams like Sherpa rejects, the rain driving at our faces. We wore improvised rain gear—plastic trash bags, hastily tailored to admit necks and arms—and we carried our sickles like weapons. Slash, hack, slash. Top-heavy, the plants gave way at the first swipe. We caught them in a dazzling rush of leaves, shook them out like big soggy beach umbrellas and unceremoniously stuffed them into trash bags. The bags skipped gracefully down the slope, and we followed them, staggering, careening, already as mucked over as alligator wrestlers. Then we proceeded to Julie Andrews’s Meadow and Jonestown, and finally to the marginal areas that lay on the far wet verges of the property.

  We were finished by three in the afternoon, every leaf, bud and twig bundled up and stowed away in the rear of the U-Haul. Stacked up there like sandbags atop a levee, the bulging bags of pot looked like a king’s ransom, like paydirt and wealth abounding. We knew better. After drying, the bulk of the crop would be so much dross: it was only the buds that concerned us, and well we understood how few they were likely to be. Still, we felt elated. Despite the rain, and considering the sweat, toil and emotional trauma that had gone into raising it, the crop had been surprisingly simple to harvest. We were rapid reapers, the cat burglars of the open field, snatching the goods and filling our sacks. Cut, bag and load. That was it. We were done. The summer camp was history.

  Gesh hustled his paper sack of dirty underwear and other worldly baggage out to the Toyota while Phil packed up his priceless mementoes, disintegrating sci-fi paperbacks, his guitar and torch. I bundled my clothes, stuffed them into the sleeping bag and collected the coffee pot and colander we’d liberated from my apartment in the city. The rest we left. The mile and a half of PVC pipe, the cattle troughs, the water pump, the motorbikes, the pickup and the nonfunctional Jeep. Not to mention the shotgun and the crooked .22, the ruptured sacks of garbage and Phil’s heroic junk sculpture. It all belonged to Vogelsang. Let him come and get it.

  My partners launched the U-Haul down the hill, twice foundering on dangerous shoals and once coming within a tire’s breadth of pitching over the side of a precipice cut like the face of the Chrysler Building. We encountered our Charybdis in the guise of a swirling spectacular pothole that nearly wrenched off the left wheel, and then moments later our Scylla loomed up on the right in the form of a stray chunk of pillow basalt the size of a Volkswagen. The trees dug their talons into the flanks of the truck as if to hold it back, the front end shimmied like a school of anchovies in distress and the rear doors flew open twice, spilling bags of pot into the free-flowing roadway. Minor impediments all. We made the necessary repairs and adjustments and floated the big treasure-laden truck down the drive like a stately galleon. I saw my comrades out to the blacktop road, gave them the thumbs-up sign and start
ed back up the hill for the Toyota.

  It was getting dark by the time I reached the cabin. Hurrying, I emerged from the grip of the trees, strode across the field and past the waiting Toyota, up the steps of the porch and into the house for my final look around. The place was silent, penumbral, already haunted by our absence. Nothing had changed, but for the disappearance of the furniture, and yet the low, littered rooms had been transformed—whereas before they’d had the look of healthy seething squalor, now they stood derelict. After all that had gone on in these rooms, after all the confrontations, disappointments and anxieties, after all the bullshit sessions, card games and miserable meals—after all the living we’d done here—the place was dead. I felt like a historian pacing off the battlefield at Philippi. I felt like a grave robber.

  I stood there in the center of the room for a long moment, watching the shadows swell and darken like living organisms, listening to the inexhaustible rain as it spanked the ground beneath the eaves. What was I waiting for? What was I doing? I shook my head like a drunk under the shower and then walked down the hallway to my room to see if I’d left anything. The door pushed open to the scrape of frantic feet and there was a blur of movement as the rat flew along the baseboard and vanished in the shadows; he’d been digging into the stained and stinking underbelly of my mattress as he might have dug into a corpse. Naked tail, a brush of whisker and the quick flashing eye: he’d been reinstated, restored to his rightful dominion. The mattress, the fetid soup cans and mouldering chicken bones, the 3-in-1 oil and the complete adventures of Bors Borka: these were his legacy.

  Looping filaments of dirt festooned the walls, the floor sagged in the center as under the force of some invisible weight, a lustrous tan spider slid up and down the guys of its trembling web like a finger on the neck of a banjo. I hadn’t forgotten anything. The wastebasket was full, scraps of glossy magazines (idealized photos of food and women, in that order) slashed at the walls, newspapers, torn flannel shirts and worn jeans lay heaped on the floor. I’d left them consciously, purposely, as I might have left them in a burning building or a foundering ship: why bother, after all? The whole run-down, gutted, roof-rent slum was nothing more than an oversized refuse bin, was the essence of trash itself.

  I turned to go—as I’d turned nearly nine months earlier, fresh from the city and stunned by the desolation of the place—and found myself confronting the calendar on the back panel of the door. I’d seen it a thousand times, ignored it, mocked it, forgotten it, but there it was. Still. The woman in the cloche hat with her face averted, the rubric of the year, the page splayed out and defaced by an unknown hand in forgotten times. A bad joke, nothing more.

  We’d harvested prematurely, nearly two weeks ahead of the designated date. Today was the thirty-first—Halloween—and we were gone. Or going. Whatever the orphic calendar portended for the thirty-second anniversary of my birth—joy or calamity or provocation—no longer mattered. I reached out, slipped the calendar from the rusty nail that secured it, folded it once and tucked it into my back pocket.

  The rain seemed heavier as I maneuvered the Toyota down the drive, past the block of pillow basalt and the downed tree limbs, and out of the clutch of the angry grasping branches. Water fanned out over the windshield faster than the spastic wipers could drive it back, the headlights made phantoms of the steaming tree trunks, my breath clouded the windows. I was picking my way carefully, maintaining momentum to keep from bogging down, my thoughts on Phil and Gesh and our rendezvous later that night, when all at once I found myself hallucinating.

  There, against the soft stagy backdrop of the trees, was an apparition, the ghost of harvest past, the clown prince of the scythe, in motley and whiteface. Huge, swelling to gargantuan proportions under the approaching headlights, the figure slogged to the far berm and stood frozen beside the road. As I eased by, the flaring point of highest illumination giving way in a flash to invisibility, I understood that this was no hallucination. No, this was flesh, flesh with a vengeance: beneath the frippery I recognized the big bones and broad vacant gaze of Marlon Sapers. Marlon Sapers, mannish boy, got up as superabundant clown, replete with bulbous nose and pancake jowls, in a drenched ruffled shirtfront and baggy suit with dancing polka dots and writhing stripes, Marlon Sapers, come to mock me. I stopped. Rolled down the window to the teeth of the blow and peered back into the rubicund glow of the taillights. I could barely make him out. “Marlon?” I called. Water rushed past the wheels with the thousand moans of the drowning, rain drilled the roof. There was no answer. But then, reedy, childlike, as tinny as a bad recording, his voice came to me over the crash of the storm—he seemed to be complaining, or no, he was offering something. “Suck your feet?” he asked.

  For a moment I lost him. The car coughed and spat, mist seeped out of the earth. Then he took a step forward and his face emerged from the night, pink, garish, huge, floating in the wash of darkness like an orb in the infinite. His expression startled me. He seemed to be grinning—Cheshire Cat, Robin Good-fellow—grinning as if in contemplation of some killing, suprahuman jest.

  The pillowcase appeared from nowhere, legerdemain. It was bulging, wet as skin, its neck gaping wide between his big buttery fists. “Trick or treat?” he said.

  Chapter 5

  I got into San Francisco about half past ten to find the mud-spattered U-Haul parked directly in front of my apartment—and poorly parked at that. One wheel was up on the curb, the cab obscured a sign that threatened TOW AWAY come seven the next morning, and Gesh had managed to straddle two and a half prime, precious, hotly sought-after and fiercely contested parking spaces. To cap it off, he’d settled beneath a high-intensity streetlamp that lit the rear of the truck like a stage. Our plan had been to meet at Vogelsang’s—we would surprise him with the truckload of pot and coerce him into allowing us to string it up to dry in his cavernous rooms and endless hallways—but the plan had fallen flat. Typically. As I discovered on arriving at the Bolinas manse, Vogelsang had eluded us once again. The gates were locked, the house was dark, the lewd mannequins stood guard. I found a note from Phil and Gesh pinned to the main gate. It read, simply, Fair Oaks.

  My co-conspirators were sunk into the furniture in the front room as I plodded up the stairs with my suitcase and Phil’s guitar. They were drinking beer, testing the limits of the stereo system with an album called White Noise Plays White Noise, and watching a sitcom about a quadraplegic detective who ferrets out evildoers through astral projection. I was wet, weary, hypnotized to the point of catatonia by the incessant frantic swipe of the Toyota’s windshield wipers. The suitcase plummeted from my grip, Phil’s guitar dropped into the rocking chair. I cut the volume on the stereo and offered an observation. “You made it,” I said.

  Still bandaged, still depilated, his bad eye blazing with the awakening joy of the exile returned, Phil swung round to acknowledge the soundness of my observation. Gesh set his beer down. “Vogelsang wasn’t there, the son of a bitch,” he said.

  Outside, in the close, shadowy depths of the U-Haul van, a hundred bags of sodden marijuana stood ready to mildew, rot, deliquesce into soup. “So I noticed,” I said.

  Another thing I noticed was the shopping bag at Phil’s feet. The paper was crisp and unblemished and it bore the logo of the corner market. Inside, atop a six-pack of generic beer, were five spanking-white cellophane-wrapped coils of clothesline. Phil was watching me closely. In the background, White Noise’s keyboard virtuoso was attempting an auditory re-creation of the siege of Britain. Gesh was watching me too. The bombs fell, the machine guns rattled. “What now?” Phil said.

  We brought the pot in, a bag at a time, just after three. The streets were quiet, the glare of the streetlamp softened by a milky drizzle. Up the stairs and down, the landlord wondering at the thump of our footsteps, the sacks of contraband like body bags, like pelf, like the insidious pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We worked quickly, silently, our shoulders slumped with guilt, our eyes raking the streets for the firs
t stab of the patrol car’s headlights. Phil stood in the back of the truck and tossed the bags forward, while Gesh and I hustled them up the stairs like ants scrambling under the burden of their misshapen egg cases. At one point a car stopped just down the street to discharge a passenger, engine rumbling, headlights slicing into the rear of the truck. We froze. A pair of voices echoed through the haze and bounded off the wet pavement, and a moment later a gangling teenager in a Gumby costume ambled up the street and into our midst. We gave him stares like swords. He looked down at his feet.

  Upstairs, I regarded the spill of slick plastic bags as I might have regarded the debris of a natural disaster or the baggage of desert nomads. The living room was inundated, the kitchen piled high, the spare room glimmering with the dull sheen of plastic. Already Gesh had begun to string the rope across the living room, securing the ends with a quick booming convergence of hammer and nail. Phil twisted open the wet bags, shook the plants over the carpet in a tumult of rasping leaves, shuddering buds and precipitant moisture, inverted them with a flick of his wrist and hooked them over the clothesline like so many wet overcoats. I cracked a window, wondering what I’d let myself in for now. Then I set the thermostat at 95 degrees and started up a pair of ratchetting fans I dug out of a box in the basement. We worked furiously, noisily. Clumsy with exhaustion, we stumbled into one another: the hammer thumped, the bags rippled, our footsteps played a frantic tarantella across the ceiling of the apartment below. As Gesh’s hammer rapped at the wall for perhaps the fiftieth time, my landlord, a middle-aged bachelor with a viscid Armenian accent, rapped at the outside door. This rapping, unidentified at first, put us in mind of agents of the law and gave us a final nasty shock, a coda to the demonic symphony of such shocks we’d endured over the course of the past nine months. But then the landlord’s voice rose faintly from the well of the stairs—“Fee-lix!”—and I knew we’d been delivered once again.