Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I met him at the base of the stairs, regarding him warily from my end of the security chain. He was wearing a skullcap and a pair of dirty striped pajamas that looked as if they’d been lifted from an internment camp, he was barefoot and his sleepy eyes were riddled with incomprehension. “What is happening here?” he said, his mouth working beneath the blue bristle of his beard. “This, this …” and he held his hands like claws to the side of his head, “this thrumping and bang-ing.”

  I told him my mother had died and that my brothers and I were constructing the coffin ourselves, in deference to the traditions of the old country. Wired, beat, my apartment devastated and body sapped, I didn’t have much trouble looking appropriately distraught. “Old country?” he said. “What is that?”

  “Boston,” I told him, sober as a motherless child.

  He looked at me for a long moment, the whites of his eyes crosshatched with broken blood vessels, lids crusted and inflamed. Three-chord rock and roll and the boom-boom-boom of the hammer filtered down from above. Breath steamed from his big flared nostrils; he shuffled his bare feet on the wet pavement. He looked puzzled, disoriented, looked as if he were about to say something but couldn’t quite get it out. After a while he turned, muttering, and slammed into his apartment.

  By dawn, my roomy Victorian had the look and feel of a curing shed in Raleigh, North Carolina, and smelled like the alley out back of a florist’s shop doused with agent orange. The atmosphere was stifling, barely breathable, the rank wet seething odor of the pot pungent as spilled perfume. It was 107 degrees in the living room. Desert winds roared from the vents, an electric space heater glowed in the corner opposite the crackling fireplace, the fans screamed for oil and we sweated like jungle explorers. As the windows were turning gray we strung up the last of the plants, nearly twenty-four hours after we’d plunged into the fields with our flashing sickles. We were worn out, frayed to the bone. We sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee from cardboard containers and staring off into space. I felt like Sisyphus taking a five-minute break, like Muhammad Ali at the end of the fourteenth round in Manila. Gesh’s head slumped forward, Phil lapped absently at a frosted doughnut. Outside, it was still raining.

  I got up and made my way through the vegetation to the living room. Bending to my record collection, I thought back to the night I’d played The Rite of Spring and Vogelsang had thumped up the stairs with his mad proposal. The room smelled like a silo, sweat dripped from my nose. I straightened up and put on a record—Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. It could have been my theme song.

  The crop dried in five days. During that interval Gesh lay roasting like a pecan on the couch, the perpetual beer clutched in his perspiring hand, while Phil and I escaped the deadly whirling sirocco breezes of the apartment by planting ourselves in the front row of the unheated ninety-nine-cent movie house around the corner, where we regaled ourselves with popcorn that tasted like Styrofoam and a succession of kung fu/slasher/biker/car-chase flicks with Spanish subtitles. Now that I had leisure for it, I also spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying. I worried about the steady wind wafting from my front window to perfume the entire block with the essence of torrefying pot, I worried about the dark looks my landlord gave me when I ran into him on the front stoop, I worried about the disposition of the U-Haul truck, which we’d somehow neglected to move and which had subsequently been towed away and impounded by municipal drones while we rested from the labors of our harvest. And then of course my personal finances were a mess: rent and utility bills on the apartment had pretty well eaten up my meager savings during the course of my exile, and we were a long way from realizing any profit on the marijuana that littered the apartment from floor to ceiling (we still had to trim, bag and peddle it). Nor could I forget my pending court appearance, though Jerpbak’s demotion could be expected to play in my favor.

  I worried about Petra, too. I phoned her several times from the pay phone outside the Cinema Latina, my home phone having been disconnected in my absence, but was unable to reach her. Was she distracted by the roar of the kiln? Was she out digging clay in some remote streambed? Had she left town for good, found a new man, flown to Puerto Vallarta for two weeks in the sun? I didn’t know. Couldn’t guess. I just hung on to the receiver and listened to the flatulent busy signal as if to some arcane code.

  Dried, that is deprived of the water weight that composed seventy percent of its bulk, the crop took on an increasingly withered and reduced look. Leaves shriveled, buds shrank. Plants that had been big as Christmas trees now seemed as light and insubstantial as paper kites. On the afternoon of the fifth day we gathered in the saunalike atmosphere of the front room to sample the product and determine its fitness for sale. Phil and I sat sweltering on the couch while Gesh broke a long squirrel’s-tail cola from a brittle branch and pared away the leaves that protruded like tongues from between the flowers. Then he plucked two of the neat fingertip-sized buds from the stem and crumbled them over a creased cigarette paper with a slow circular rub of his palms. No one said a word, the moment as drenched in ritual as a high mass at the Vatican. We watched as he rolled the joint with sacerdotal solemnity, sealed it with a sidelong lick and held it up before our eyes as if he were blessing the host. Sere leaves rustled overhead, the fans hummed and the heat swabbed at the back of my throat as Gesh struck the ceremonial match and held the joint out to me as to a communicant at the rail. I took it to my lips and inhaled.

  After the smoke had been around three times, I found myself concentrating on the big trimmed cola that lay before me on the coffee table like one of those toy evergreen trees you get with model-railroad kits. It was worth, roughly, a hundred and fifty dollars. We’d grown it from nothing, from a seed you could barely see, from a speck of lint. Entranced by the marvel of it, I lifted the cola from the table as a diamond buyer might have lifted a gem from the tray, slowly turning it over in my hands. It was stiff as a bottle brush, the rich dark green of it touched here and there with the gold and white of the tiny stigmas. I exhaled and wiped my brow. Gesh was smiling serenely. The smoke was smooth, slightly sweet and minty, and as good as or better than what we’d been sampling in the field over the course of the past six weeks. I felt a rush of pride, discovering in that instant the exultation of the creator, the nurturer, the husbandman with the prize pumpkin: we’d done it.

  “What do you think?” Gesh asked.

  I didn’t need to consult Dowst for this one. I raised myself in the chair, astral specks and phantom amoebae floating unchecked through my field of vision. “It’s ready,” I said.

  The final phase of the harvesting process—separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were—commenced immediately. We rose as one from our seats and threw open the windows, cut the thermostat, and unplugged the fans and space heater. Then we lifted down the skeletal plants, removed the flowering tops and arranged them on a folding aluminum banquet table I nastily set up in the middle of the front room, and fed the rest—leaves, branches and the horny fibrous stems that looked like the lower legs of storks or spoonbills—into the fireplace. (This gave rise to a steady spew of viscous black smoke that poured from the chimney for two days, casting an industrial pall over the neighborhood and twice prodding my landlord out of the garage with a garden hose.) After sampling another bud or two—purely for analytical purposes—we sent out for beer, turned up the music, sharpened our scissors and sat down to the tedious business of manicuring the tops.

  Early next morning, Gesh called Rudy. I didn’t like Rudy—didn’t like the way he looked, didn’t like his locker-room humor and half-witted street talk, and especially didn’t like his connection with Jones. But Rudy, dealer in stimulants and sedatives, was going to do us a service. For five dollars an hour and all he could smoke, he was going to help us trim, weigh and bag our lovely top-grade sinsemilla, and then he was going to take our share on consignment at $1,400 a pound and peddle it to his clientele. We would take a beating to the tune of $200 a pound, but we figured it was
well worth it to avoid the hassle of having to unload the stuff ourselves.

  Rudy came sniffing up the stairs like a bloodhound. His eyes bulged as if under some abnormal internal pressure—as if there were something alive in there trying to get out—and the boneless dollop of flesh that passed for his nose was twitching in agitation. Under his right arm, cradled like an attenuated football, he carried an Ohaus triple-beam scale in a paper sack. “Hey man, how the fuck you doing?” he said, clapping Gesh’s shoulder with a hand shriveled like a bird’s claw. He greeted Phil with a “What’s happening?” and nodded at me in passing.

  “Holy Christ,” he said, pushing his way into the living room, “what are you guys trying to do here with all this shit—get yourselves busted or what?” He hovered over the fire, warming his hands. Beside him, stacked up like cattle fodder, was the dross we’d yet to burn. “You know it smells like there’s a truck-load of pot on fire out there?”

  I knew. My landlord, eager to inquire into certain disturbing phenomena (such as the irregular hours I was keeping, the prodigious belch of black smoke emanating from the chimney and the five-day period during which the oil burner never shut down), had cornered me half an hour earlier as I was coming up the front steps with a grease-stippled bag of fried wonton. He’d traded in the yarmulke for a faded Giants cap, from the nether margin of which a band of hair the color and texture of an Airedale’s projected at a peculiar angle. “I am not sleeping last night,” he said, delivering this information as if it were momentous, revolutionary, as if he were announcing the discovery of a new planet or the cure for cancer. I told him I was sorry to hear that. He peered at me questioningly out of his black perplexed eyes, and I had the feeling he was sizing me up, trying to reconcile his memory of me with the wild-eyed apparition standing before him. It was as if he weren’t altogether sure I wasn’t an imposter.

  “So,” he said suddenly, glancing up at the fuming blanket of smoke that flew up from the roof as from the depths of a refinery, “you are cold? With open window?” Just then I caught a whiff of it, a smell reminiscent of rock festivals in packed concert halls. “The fire, you mean?” He nodded. A few months ago I would have made an effort, I would have soothed him with a flurry of apologies, promises and plausible lies—but now I found that I just couldn’t muster the energy. Instead, I ducked my head, gave him a grief-stricken look and told him we were burning my mother’s mementoes in accordance with her last wishes. “You know,” I added, “photo albums, diaries, old seventy-eights of the Andrews Sisters and whatnot.” He cleared his throat respectfully and told me I had one month to get out.

  For all his loudmouthing, though, Rudy didn’t seem especially concerned. Smoke was smoke, and who was to say we weren’t burning sandalwood or green mesquite—or creosote telephone poles, for that matter? He knew it as well as we did. Unless you walked up the block thinking pot, you’d never notice a thing. Of course, the whole fiasco had been ill-advised from the start. Bringing a hundred pounds of pot into the heart of the city in a U-Haul truck was beyond mere fatuity—it was irrational, irresponsible, the act of desperate men. But whereas we’d spent nearly nine months in a state of perpetual xenophobic panic in an area that contained fewer people in ten square miles than lived on this very block, we now tended to view things more dispassionately. Perhaps we felt safe in the very absurdity of what we were doing (weren’t all the narcs out sniffing around in the woods, after all?). Or perhaps we just didn’t give a shit. At any rate, I took Rudy’s comment for what it was—a means of staking out the territory, setting the record straight: we were bunglers and fools, dangerous even to ourselves, callow freshmen in the school of pharmaceutical usage and abusage, and he was professor emeritus.

  The first thing Rudy did was roll himself two joints. He tucked one in his shirt pocket for future reference and settled into the easy chair with the other. I watched him fuss over it like a cigar buyer in Havana—licking it, sniffing it, drawing deep and exhaling with a sigh—as he smoked the thing down to a stub. He sat there ensconced in the chair like a guru. After a while he said, “Good shit,” and pulled himself from the grip of the chair to set up his scales. First he weighed out a pound of the trimmed tops; then, for comparison, a pound of the raw stuff. I was sitting at the aluminum table with Phil and Gesh, doggedly snipping away with my scissors, my mind on other things: viz., Petra, my lack of employment or capital and my coming eviction. The TV was on, as it had been continuously since we’d stepped through the door (some soap opera rife with hard-drinking, tormented middle-aged men in Lacoste shirts and a host of apparently sex-crazed teenage women), and the radio pulsed softly to the thump of a synthesized disco beat.

  Rudy nosed through the entire crop—colas big and small—poking around like a rodent, a big swollen two-legged rat come down from the mountain to take another bite out of our profits. I asked him when he was going to sit down and start earning the five bucks an hour we were paying him to trim pot. He didn’t answer, but a moment later he turned round and said, “You know, I’d say you guys got about thirty pounds or so here—plus maybe a couple pounds of shake.”

  Thirty pounds. Gesh looked at Phil. Phil looked at me. No one said a word, but the calculators clicked on in our heads. Our share would be ten pounds, split three ways. At $1,400 a pound—that is, minus Rudy’s commission—we would come out with something like $4,600 apiece, or about $162,000 short of our original estimate. And oh yes, each of us would have to kick in $555 of that to cover the $5,000 Vogelsang had laid out for Jones, the extortionist. It was a shock. We’d known the figure would be low, but this was less by half than our most dismal estimate. After a moment or so, long enough for Rudy’s words to sink in and for the figures to materialize deep in our brains and work their way forward, Phil’s voice rose in a kind of plaint from the end of the table. “You sure?”

  Later—it was nearly dark, the hills beyond the window cluttered with palely lit faécLades, houses like playing cards or dominoes—I was out in the kitchen opening a can of cream of tomato soup when Rudy sauntered in, looking for matches. He was stoned, big dilated pupils eclipsing the insipid yellow irises, his lower lip gone soft with fuddlement. “What’s happening?” he said. I ignored him, concentrating on the way the soup sucked back from the can; I reached for the Worcestershire, black pepper. Rudy circled the room, vaguely patting at his pockets, poking into drawers. Finally he stopped in front of the stove. “Got a match?” he said.

  I was irritated. Pissed off. The place was a mess, I was a failure and Rudy was a jerk. I dug a pack of matches from my pocket and flung them at him without turning my head.

  The soup was the color of spoiled salmon, carrots gone tough in the ground. I stirred it without interest or appetite, watching the spoon as it broke the murky surface, vanished and reappeared. There was the rasp and flare of a match, the stink of sulfur, and then the supple, sweet odor of marijuana. “Hey, man,” Rudy said at my elbow—I was stirring the soup, stirring—“no reason to feel bad about it. You guys at least got something out of it.”

  “What?” I snarled, turning on him like an attack dog. “What did we get out of it? Four thousand bucks?” I was frothing. “Big shit.”

  “Better than Jonesie.”

  Jonesie. The diminutive, no less. Ah, if I’d felt bitter to this point, chewing over my hurts and losses behind the snip of the scissors and the rattle of the spoon in the pot, now I was enraged, ready to strike out at anything that came into range. “Jonesie,” I echoed, mimicking him. “The leech. The cocksucker. He did nothing, nothing at all, not a lick—and for your information he’s going to wind up with more than any of us three.”

  Rudy’s eyes dodged mine. “I can’t do nothing about that, man—don’t take it out on me.” Then he went into a little routine about how he knew the dude and all, but that didn’t mean he was his mother or anything, did I see what he was getting at? I saw. But there was something in his eyes he couldn’t control, a shiftiness, as if he was holding something back. He proferred the
joint. I refused it. Vehemently. “Besides, I didn’t mean this year,” he said, exposing his gamy brown teeth in a conciliatory smile. “I mean last year. Vogelsang really screwed the guy.”

  “Vogelsang?”

  Rudy looked put out, angry and resentful suddenly, as if I’d spat down the front of his shirt or torn the stitches out of a knitting wound. For an instant I thought he was going to hit me. “Yeah,” he hissed, “your pal, the big wheeler-dealer, the dope king. Vogelsang.”

  “Vogelsang?” I repeated, as, lost and directionless, I might have repeated the name of a distant subway stop in a foreign country. Something was up, toil and trouble, all my brooding suspicions congealing like the soup in the pot before me.

  “It cost me money, man.” Rudy, of the downsloping chin and punished nose, of the pigeon chest and hepatic skin, was outraged, the thought of it more than he could bear. Take my mother, my sister, my old hound dog, but don’t you come near my blue vinyl checkbook.

  I dropped the spoon in the pot, feeling weak, staring into his tumid glistening eyes as into matching crystal balls and groping toward illumination—or rather toward confirmation of what I’d known in my heart all along: Vogelsang had done us dirty.

  Rudy shuffled his feet in agitation, bent to rub his knee; smoke tugged at both sides of his head like a hot towel wrapped round a toothache. “Son of a bitch talked me into putting up three grand. Two hundred pounds, he said, easy. We’d split even, me, him and Jones.”

  Vogelsang, Vogelsang, the syllables pounded in my blood with evil rhythm. I felt betrayed, I felt hot and vengeful. I saw myself slipping into his shadowy museum, lifting one of the Cambodian pig stickers down from the wall, and creeping up the hallway; I saw the door to the bedroom, the waterbed, Vogelsang.