Budding Prospects

by T. C. Boyle

  I ate tuna fish, but I didn’t taste it—I could have been chewing cardboard smeared with mayonnaise. My stomach contracted, acid rose in my throat. I looked up to see the waitress flirting with one of the old men at the counter—leaning into him like a dance instructor—while his counterpart stared dolefully into his coffee cup. Phil waved a monstrous, chili-dribbling burger in one hand, and a fork in the other. He was relating the plot of the science-fiction trilogy he’d begun two nights ago. I wanted to leave. Split, vanish, dissolve. Toss my money on the table, hunch down in my jacket and slink out the door.

  “So Bors Borka, he’s the hero, finds himself on this planet where instead of only two sexes, they have five, all of which are necessary—all together—for an orgasm.” Phil took a bite of his burger, delicately lapping the extruded chili from between his fingers in the process. “There’s this penislike thing, the omphallus, that sticks out of this lake made of protoplasm, and it branches into three stalks. Then there’s this viridian creature sort of like a female, only instead of a vagina—”

  “Phil,” I said, pressing both hands to my temples. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  I tucked the newspaper under my arm. Strings and oboes tugged at the chords of “Jailhouse Rock,” rain began to natter at the window, the old man at the counter slipped his hand up the waitress’s dress. “I’ve got a headache.”

  Phil gave me a look of shock and dismay, as if I’d just suggested he share his food with everyone in the restaurant and then mail the leftovers to the Underfed Orphans Society. He took a quick bite of his Super Chili Beef Burger and a forkful of stuffed cabbage. “Christ,” he muttered, digging for another hurried mouthful. “You sure?”

  The booth trembled as one of the patrolmen shifted in his seat. I nodded at Phil, then glanced up nervously and found myself staring into the young mother’s eyes. They were black, those eyes, soft and ripe as pitted olives. But I didn’t want olives, I wanted escape, seclusion, anonymity. I looked away in confusion, focusing on the Campbell’s Soup display and making a show of moving my lips as I read the labels: Chunky Mediterranean Vegetable, Turkey with Avocado, Plantain Broth. “All right,” Phil said, frowning. “All right—just let me finish what’s on my plate. I can take the burger with me.”

  I pushed away my half-eaten sandwich and motioned for the waitress. She was poised over the second old man now, refilling his cup while he stared morosely into the knot of his hands. “The check,” I pantomimed. She ignored me. Jerpbak, I thought, the name howling in my ears. This was bad karma, malicious fate, the beginning and the end. I waved my arm. “Check, please,” I mouthed, fighting for restraint. Behind me, the rasping continued unabated, officers of the law engaged in private business, their flesh and mine wedded by a thin slab of plywood and Naugahyde. Someone coughed. And then, as if a hot wire had been applied to my temple, a nasty certainty leapt through my brain: Jerpbak was sitting behind me. Jerpbak himself. Of course. Who else?

  Suddenly I was on my feet. Jerpbak, Jerpbak, Jerpbak: the name beat with my pulse. It all became clear in that instant—he’d tracked me down, spider and fly. He was a Heat, a Holmes, a Javert. He’d seen the guilt on me like a dye, like the thief’s tattoo, and he’d known in that moment what I was doing in Tahoe. Yes, and now he was waiting, that’s all, waiting till the plants were grown and the buds mature, biding his time till he could swoop down on us when it would hurt most. Phil looked up at me, a smear of chili at the corner of his mouth. “I’m, I’m …”I stammered, digging a five from my pocket and flinging it down on the table. Then I took a deep breath, steeling myself. At the count of three I was going to swing round, lower my head and stride out the door.

  One Jerpbak, two Jerpbak, three: I pivoted and found myself locking eyes with a scowling cop in his late forties who looked as if he’d devoted his life to the invention of instruments of torture. There was no trace of sympathy or decency in his face, but I felt like embracing him, buying him a cigar, stuffing twenties in his pocket—he might have been an inveterate suspect-beater and civil-rights abuser for all I knew, but he wasn’t Jerpbak. The realization so elated me that I lurched forward and tripped over his slick black-booted foot. As I tumbled past him, fighting for balance and yelping an apology over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the second cop, the one whose back had for the last ten minutes been so alarmingly contiguous to mine. A glimpse of reflecting shades, cleft chin, clipped and parted hair. That was enough. I slammed into the cigarette machine, tore open the door and flung myself at the cleansing, quickening rain.

  A moment later the door eased open and Phil joined me on the front steps. He asked if I was all right. I told him I just needed a little air, that’s all. We started for the pickup in silence, raindrops slanting down like so many straight pins. I hardly noticed. All that mattered was that they were watching us (I knew they were, as certainly as I knew that forests are immovable and men born of women), observing the way we lifted our feet and hunched our shoulders, noting the make of the truck and the license plate number, idly fingering their handcuffs. Police surveillance, I thought. Undercover operations. Tapes, photographs, body hairs. Suddenly I saw myself at the window of the cabin, opening up on them with the shotgun, stopping bullets with my teeth, vanishing in a puff of smoke. I slipped the keys into Phil’s hand. “What’s this?” he said. “You don’t want to drive?”

  “No, I don’t feel up to it,” I said, climbing into the passenger’s seat. The pickup was loaded with plastic pipe in twenty-foot lengths, with four fifty-five-gallon drums and a gasoline-powered water pump. I was trying my best to look like a tourist or hitchhiker, but I knew it was hopeless. We might as well have painted the truck Day-Glo orange with vermilion pinstriping and the legend DR. FEELGOOD’S FARMS. We were dope farmers—that was as readily apparent to any fool on the street as our species identification—dope farmers stockpiling equipment for their irrigation system. I hunched down in the seat.

  “So,” Phil said, grinding the ignition, “I didn’t tell you the best part yet.” I was mute, cataleptic. He went on anyway. “Well, Borka ducks into this cave to escape a column of Termagants from the planet Terma, when he miraculously comes upon four of the sexes trying to get it on—but of course they’re missing the fifth link, which just happens to be this armless man-sized thing with a little penis and a prehensile tail. So here comes the space hero, fascinated, watching these four weird creatures go at it, heaving and rocking in frustration …”

  The truck jerked back, drawing away from the cafée A like a missile from the launching pad. I fought the impulse to look up. Fought it, and lost. As Phil swung around and shifted gears, I snatched a glance out of the corner of my eye. I saw the cruiser with its gold badge of justice, the cracked cinder blocks of the front porch, the little box of the cafée A with its picture windows and advertisements for corn dogs and thick shakes. Light fell from the windows in slabs. I could see nothing. And then, just a flash: dark forms, bereft of animation, as shadowy and insubstantial as the figures in a dream.

  Chapter 7

  That night, after we’d unloaded the truck and put dinner on, I spread the Jerpbak article out on the kitchen table and motioned for Gesh to have a look. Gesh had spent the afternoon digging holes, and he was stretched out on the couch like a corpse, a hot toddy in one hand and Book One of The Ravishers of Pentagord—Phil’s trilogy—in the other. From the front bedroom I could hear Phil strumming his guitar and moaning softly. “What is it?” Gesh said. “What have you got—drugs?”

  My throat thickened. I didn’t think I could get the words out. “It’s an article. In the paper. Come take a look.”

  Gesh sighed, pushed himself up and started across the room. I was poised over the gray newsprint, scanning the article for the twentieth time, each insidious phrase poking at me like a hot scalpel. Gesh was in no hurry. He paused to refresh his toddy and slip a tape into his cracked-plastic battery-powered tape player (he’d unearthed two cassettes in the glo
ve compartment of the Jeep Vogelsang had left us—something unidentifiable that sounded like a diva gargling in the shower, and an ancient Grateful Dead tape that repeatedly stuck on “Truckin’.” He opted for the latter).

  Busted, down an Bourbon Street,

  Set up, like a bowlin’ pin …

  I watched Gesh’s face as he read the article. When he’d finished he took a sip of his toddy, looked up at me and said “So?”

  “So?” I could feel the floodgates opening wide. “What’s with you? Don’t you know who this joker is?” I was shouting, rapping Jerpbak’s photograph with the back of my hand as if I could tear him in the flesh.

  Gesh looked less certain of himself. He shrugged.

  “This is the maniac that threw me up against the wall in the Eldorado County Jail when I bailed you guys out. Now he’s here, dedicating his life to busting dope farmers—I mean, doesn’t that strike you as a little strange?”

  Gesh just stared at the paper, his jaw locked. The tape player slammed away at “Truckin’ “ over and over again: Truckin’ … Truckin’ … Truckin’… I stalked over and hit the eject button. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he murmured. And then more forcefully: “It’s a pisser. A real weird coincidence and a bad break. But nothing to go crazy over.”

  Phil appeared in the doorway of his room, the guitar strung round his neck like an umpire’s chest protector. “What’s all the commotion?”

  I showed him the article. He held the paper close to his face, licking his lips and sucking in his breath in quick little puffs as he read.

  “We just have to be extra careful, that’s all,” Gesh said.

  Phil folded the newspaper neatly and set it down on the counter. Then he looked me in the eye, poker-faced, and hit the refrain of “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  If Phil could clown about it, I couldn’t. I was tense, shaken, wired to the breaking point. Things were conspiring against us, all our sweat and toil come to naught: we weren’t going to wind up rich, we were going to wind up in jail.

  “We’ll stick to the back roads,” Gesh said. Back roads? What was he talking about—there were nothing but back roads. “And instead of buying supplies in Willits, we’ll go all the way down to Santa Rosa, where nobody’ll notice.”

  I didn’t want to end up in jail. But even worse than the thought of jail was the thought of the bust itself. A dozen troopers, in riot helmets and flak jackets, bursting through the door at first light, roughing us up, rifling our possessions, hauling us off in sorrow and subjection—it had become the standard nightmare. Still worse was its corollary, its sad and inevitable conclusion: detection would mean the end of the project, the failure of the farm.

  Something had happened to me over the course of the past few weeks, something that transformed me with each crank of the come-along and thrust of the shovel: I’d become a believer. Perhaps it was the evangelical fervor with which Phil, Gesh and even Dowst regarded the project, perhaps it was the callus I’d developed on my hands and feet or the strips of muscle that corrugated my back and swelled the veins of my arms—but whatever it was, I’d been bitten more deeply than I realized. If I’d entered into the thing as a lark, an adventure, attracted as much by the action as the money, I was now fully, absolutely and zealously committed to making it work.

  How else could I have gone on, day after day, pitching dirt and hammering fenceposts like a flunky? How else if I wasn’t certain in the very root of my being, in the last looping curve of my innermost gut, that we would succeed? No gains without pains, Poor Richard said. Plough deep … and you shall have corn to sell and to keep. Yes, indeed. We would subdue the land, make it produce, squeeze the dollars from it through sacrifice, sheer force of will and Yankee gumption. It was the dream of the pioneers themselves.

  But I was no pioneer. I was edgy, nervous, a chronic quitter. If I understand now how deeply involved I was in the summer camp—it had to succeed, not so much for the money itself or what it could buy, but as the tangible and final result of our labor, the fruit of our enterprise, the proof of the dream—I did not understand it then. Not that night. Not there in the kitchen, my face hot with the glow of the lantern and the shock of Jerpbak. Maybe I was being irrational, loosing my fears like hobgoblins and bogies—but then the calendar and Jerpbak’s reemergence were irrational, too. I was spooked. I was angry.

  “Okay,” Phil said, “we’re all a little paranoid. But just because of one newspaper article and a couple of cops that just happen to sit behind us in a diner, for Christ’s sake …” He waved his hand as if he were swatting gnats.

  Gesh ran his fingers through his hair, then settled himself on the edge of the table and folded his arms. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, “I think you’re blowing things way out of proportion, man. Sure it’s bad news that this fucking jerk is launching a one-man crusade to bust dope farmers, but you got to remember there’s a lot of dope farmers out there. To think he’s out to get you is insane, it’s preposterous.”

  “Dr. Freud, I presume?” Phil said. He tried to shake my hand but I pulled away.

  “I mean, do you really think he bugged the ashtray in your Toyota or something—just because you made an illegal U-turn?”

  I had to get out. The pressure was building in me like beer on a full bladder. I snatched my jacket from the chair and slammed out the door.

  The night was torn with ragged clouds. Stars whitened the gaps, crickets pulsed like a heartbeat. Somewhere a tree groaned. There was a breeze—damp, fragrant—a southerly breeze that smelled as if it had rattled coconut palms and lifted the scent from hibiscus and frangipani. It wafted up now, a touch of warmth, out of the darkness that engulfed our lower growing areas. I gazed at the sky, clear in the interstices all the way back to the molars of the galaxy, and did not think the least thought about man’s fate, the unfathomable universe or group sex on Pentagord. I thought of things worldly and quotidian. Jerpbak. The greenhouse. Mysteriously blighted seedlings.

  I breathed deeply—spring breeze, late April already—urinated in the model hole and fumbled my way to the greenhouse. The feather-light door swung back on the hinges I’d installed, and I stepped in and surrendered to the rank wild odor of working soil, of fertility and the dark germ of life. Dowst’s flashlight hung from a bent nail just inside the door. I found it and let the tube of light play over the ranks of Styrofoam cups, the stunted and late-emerging plants we’d yet to put in the ground and the flashing strips of aluminum foil Dowst had tacked up as reflectors. He’d arranged the planters on racks in ascending tiers—like grandstands—with a narrow footpath in between. Still agitated, I threaded my way up the path, thinking to find solace in the still, burgeoning atmosphere. It was a mistake. With the healthy plants already in the ground, the place looked barren. I surveyed it slowly, dismally, the husks of dead plantlings brushing at my pants, new growth spotting the remaining cups like a sprinkle in the desert.

  Dowst had left for Marin three days earlier, in quest of the seeds we so desperately needed to make up our deficit (with just over a thousand seedlings planted, we needed at least nine hundred more to approach our original estimate). There were, he insisted, entrepreneurs who let their fall crops go to seed to provide for the germinatory needs of people like us—for a price, of course. A price that would come out of our net profit. And though it was a pity that the germination rate of his own seeds hadn’t been higher—that’s nature’s choice, he said, clucking his tongue—he was confident he could obtain more than enough new seeds to suit our purposes. As I stood there counting cups in the tenebrous cave of the greenhouse, I hoped he was right.

  Nearly three-quarters of the cups were empty. In some there was no evidence whatever that anything had been planted; in others, wilted brown stalks gave testimony to some inscrutable depredation. Phil maintained that the locusts were responsible—couldn’t we hear them screeching in the trees? Gesh thought it might be aphids. Or beetles or some
thing. Dowst, standing firm on the quality of his seeds, theorized that a fungus may have been attacking the roots of the young plants. I was puzzled, distressed. I’d watched the infinitesimal green filaments emerge from the earth, crooked as sweetly as dollar signs, and then come back the following morning to see that they’d been grazed to the root as I slept. Night after night I stalked the greenhouse, sitting in darkness, breath suspended, ears perked, waiting for the telltale crunch of mandibles or the scurry of soleless feet, and always I’d been skunked. There was nothing there—neither beetles nor aphids. Nor snails, leafhoppers, fruit flies or flying sheep for that matter. Just a silence, a silence so absolute I imagined I could hear the seeds rupturing their shells. Now, as I probed the cluttered corners with the flashlight, a sinking defeated feeling took hold of me—as if I’d been crushed under and sucked dry like a bad seed—and suddenly I understood that I was looking at the greenhouse for the last time.

  It was an old feeling, compounded of fury and despair, a choking impotent rage that could only be salved by turning away, by running. I’d felt it when I reread the same page of Carlyle for the fiftieth time, stuffed my books in a trashcan and took the bus for San Francisco while Ronnie waited tables and old Dr. Pengrave sat checking his watch and fussing over the exam questions he’d never get to ask me. I’d felt it in Boston, looking out from the projectionist’s booth at the nodding heads and listening to the furtive clatter of white port bottles on the stained cement floor. I’d felt it when I was out of work and out of luck and Ronnie came home and told me she’d been accepted in the MBA program at Wharton and I looked up from my magazine and told her I wasn’t moving. Yes: then especially. I remembered the look on her face, the way she held out the acceptance letter as if it were the deed to an oil well or a certificate of beatification. I put you through four years of grad school, she said. Four years. Now it’s my turn.