Budding Prospects

by T. C. Boyle

  The night had suddenly grown dark again. In the garish glow of the embers, Phil’s face looked like some Polish Christ’s, gaunt and long-nosed, suffused with suffering. Gesh’s hair stood straight out from his head, his face was blackened, the yellow strips of the aloha shirt trailed from him as if he were peeling. I was trying to catch my breath, experience relief, savor the first few moments of life without frenzy, when Gesh turned to me, the lines of his face underscored with soot and locked in the grid of rage he wore into battle. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he growled. “Can’t you see Phil’s got to be taken to the hospital?”

  I glanced at Phil. His right arm had crusted over and the welts on his chest and shoulders were raw; a slashing wet wound cut back into his hairline. He was a mess. “Can you …?” I began, turning to Gesh. I meant to ask if he was sure he could handle things in the event the fire started up again, but I was jittery still and unable to find the words. As I faltered, the brush began to flare in a pocket out by the propane tank.

  “I can drive myself,” Phil said, so softly I could barely hear him. He looked like the survivor of a DC-10 crash, his clothes reduced to rags, body scorched, hair gone.

  “Bullshit,” Gesh said. “You take him, Felix.”

  I felt sapped, felt as if I’d just come off a two-week shift in the coal mine—felt as if I’d been trapped in a coal mine, for that matter, buried under tons of hot rock, breathing noxious fumes and drinking beakers of acid. My shoulders and arms ached, I was bleeding in half a dozen places, my hands stung as if I’d dipped them in a deep fryer and then rubbed them with alcohol. I felt like shit, but I also felt transcendent, exhilarated, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. I’d stayed with it, fought the odds like a square-jawed hero, and won. “Sure,” I said.

  Gesh had already begun to move off toward the presumptuous little blaze licking at the propane tank, but he paused to look me in the eye. “Go,” he said, and it sounded like a benediction.

  Chapter 2

  Trees cowered along the road, signposts and mileage markers backed off like startled animals, the pavement itself seemed to plunge away from the clutch of the headlights as if dropping into oblivion. It was four a.m. by the dashboard clock, and I was coming into Willits at eighty, Jerpbak and his jackbooted legions be damned: I was the one on urgent business this time. Full of grace, the lark ascending, survivor, victor, hardass, I took the curves like a teenager with identity problems and sucked the straightaways into the future with a blast of exhaust. A road sign—it sprang up like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show and then vanished instantaneously—announced the city limits. SPEED LIMIT 35. I slowed to sixty. Through the town center, past the nightglow of the Willits Diner, the neon lure of motels and quick-stop restaurants, stoplights falling away like leaves in a windstorm, noli me tangere.

  Phil slouched in the death seat, eyes lidded. His neck had sunk into his chest and his head pitched and rolled with the road’s abrasions, his face impossibly heavy, a thing of stone. He hadn’t uttered a word since we’d left the farm. Was he asleep? In shock? Withdrawn in the web of his pain like a crippled animal, like a dog licking its mangled paw in the dark void beneath the house? I glanced over at him. He’d propped himself against the window, raw back arching away from contact with the seat, his near shoulder stippled with blisters, pitted, cratered, rough as toadskin. “You okay?” I whispered, watching the road. He began to cough into his fist. I stepped on the gas. “Another minute, Phil,” I murmured, lurching round the only other vehicle on the road—a creeping heedless bread truck—with a desperate jerk of the wheel. Phil didn’t even lift his head.

  The hospital was like a medieval leprosarium, poorly lighted, neglected, falling into ruin. Cheap additions fanned out from the main building like the wings of a crippled bird, the sloping drive was afflicted with potholes, slabs of pale green stucco peeled from the walls like sloughed skin. I thundered past the lions couchant and Ionic columns of the main entrance (long since boarded up) and did a sloppy power slide into the AMBULANCE ONLY/NO PARKING/TOW AWAY zone in front of the emergency entrance. Phil clawed his way out of the car as if emerging from a tomb and tottered toward the doorway on stiff legs, his fists clenched at his sides. I swung open the door for him and we found ourselves in a scuffed hallway cluttered with plastic plants, cheap furniture and collapsible wheelchairs.

  “Yes?” The night nurse sat stiffly at a pine desk outside the emergency room, alert as a three-headed dog. She was blond, forty, a victim of dry skin and a lifetime of suppressing emotion. Beyond her I saw a dull wash of light, a clutter of chairs, the janitor, feet up, white socks, masticating a bologna sandwich and devouring a Louis L’Amour Western.

  “We’ve had an accident,” I said.

  “Name?”

  “Mine or his?”

  Bent over a printed form, her pen poised to record information, the nurse’s cap cleaving her head like a scythe, she expelled a long withering depthless sigh of exasperation. “The name of the individual to be admitted,” she said without looking up.

  Phil croaked out his name.

  “Sex? Age? Height? Weight? Medical insurance? Allergies?” The questions came like body blows in a prizefight, cumulative, unending, wearying. Phil stood there in the sepia light, burned raw, the collar of his incinerated T-shirt still clinging to his neck, charred underwear poking through the holes in his pants. We were both in blackface.

  “Look,” I said, cutting her off in mid-phrase—was she really asking about his bank account?—“the man is in pain, can’t you see that?”

  “Savings?”

  Phil looked as if he were about to go down for the count. “Crocker,” he gasped.

  “Major credit card? Next of kin? Religion?”

  “Listen,” I said. She ignored me.

  “Sign here.” As she pushed the form toward Phil, she focused her colorless eyes on him for the first time, and I saw with a jolt that there was nothing there. Neither curiosity nor concern, sympathy or interest. She might have been home in bed, dancing in a casino, married to the Aga Khan. But she was here. In Willits. At four-ten in the morning. She’d witnessed resuscitation and expiration, stroke, hemorrhage and loss of hope, seen the human form twisted and degraded, hacked, torn, bathed in blood, pus, mucus, urine, she’d seen blue babies and blanched corpses. We were nothing. Scabs, vermin, dirt. The contact lenses clung to her eyes like blinders.

  Phil signed.

  As Phil stooped painfully to drag pen across paper, the doctor appeared as if on cue. He came flashing through the emergency-room door in a pristine scrub shirt, young, perfect, his head a mass of imbricate hair, mustache impeccable, teeth aligned, skin clear. “Well,” he crooned, jocular as an anchorman delivering the news of three hundred thousand fatalities in a Hunan earthquake, “so we’ve had a little mishap?” He was winking, nodding, grinning, as if we were sixth graders caught in some minor peccancy—playing with matches or peeping into the girls’ locker room. “Sensitive, is it? Yes, yes,” he purred, taking Phil by the elbow and steering him toward the back room in a flurry of one-liners and sympathetic tongue-clucks. As they passed through the doorway I heard the doctor’s voice rise in screaming falsetto as he broke into a mock Negro dialect: “And then she says, ’Lordy, lordy, this dude done got burned!’ “ There was a single wild bray of laughter, and then the door swung to with a click.

  I took a seat in the waiting room. The janitor had finished his sandwich and was tenderly examining the ball of his right foot, from which he’d removed the sock. A bucket of filthy water stood beside him. the mop handle protruding from it like a reed in a swamp. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. I was feeling weary, numb, the stirrings of a nameless dread pounding in my organs like jungle drums, a subtle chemical abstersion flushing my veins of the adrenaline that had kept me going over the past two hours. Freud, coming down off his cocaine, knew the feeling. So did Sherlock Holmes and the speed freaks on Haight Street. I’d felt exultant, energized, pote
nt, rushing with stamina and inspiration, and now all I felt was empty. It was over, the crisis past. I’d consumed enough vodka before the fire erupted to be drunk now, but I didn’t feel drunk at all. I felt tired. Frightened. Depressed. I opened my eyes once and saw that the janitor hadn’t moved—he was fixed in the cloudy frame of my vision, feet forever white, rubbing, rubbing.

  When I woke, the janitor was sloshing dirty water across the floor and the beaming physician was standing over me. “Your friend,” he said, “Phil?”

  I nodded, rubbing my eyes. “Yeah?”

  “He’s been burned pretty severely—right shoulder, right forearm, chest, back, hands—and he’s lost a lot of fluid.” He was rocking back and forth on his heels, grinning like a talk-show host.

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  Oh, he was beaming now, this doctor. There was no cancer in his body, he’d never bled, bruised or burned, his heart was like a piston. This was the question he’d been waiting for, this the reason he’d poked at preserved cadavers in a chilly basement in Guadalajara and interned at Cleveland General—for this moment and the infinitude of others like it. He was in no danger. He jogged ten miles a day, forswore tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, cholesterol, food additives and TV. But Phil? “We’ll have to keep him overnight. At least.”

  The doctor wasn’t moving. He was winking again now, nodding and tossing his eyebrows like a stray Marx brother. “What about you?” he said, looking down at my hands.

  “Me?” It hadn’t occurred to me that I might need treatment, too. I lifted my hands and examined them as if I’d never seen them before.

  “You’ve got a second-degree burn there.” He smiled. “Blistering, extravasated fluid, risk of infection.” He looked pleased with himself.

  Ten minutes later I was bent over the nurse’s desk, a pain killer dissolving in the pit of my stomach, my hands imprisoned in gauze. The sixty questions had passed the nurse’s lips, the responses had been duly recorded and the form shoved at me for confirmation. I was fumbling with the pen, struggling awkwardly with my gauze mittens and attempting a clonic, looping two-handed signature, when the outside door flew back with the sort of histrionic boom that announces Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust. Windows rattled up and down the corridor, a dull metallic echo resounded from deep in the hospital’s bowels. I looked up. Bullet head, frozen spine, boots like truncheons: Officer Jerpbak stepped through the doorway.

  He was not alone. Cradled in his right arm, dead weight, was a Halloween ghoul, a bloodslick puppet, an extra from a sleazy flick about knife-wielding maniacs. Heels dragged, blood flowed. Signal 30, I thought, disintegrating sports cars, overturned logging trucks, head wounds, multiple contusions. I backed off as Jerpbak, one arm thrown out for balance, staggered down the hallway under his burden. I’d never seen so much blood. It maculated the floor, darkened the front of Jerpbak’s uniform, blotted the features of the limp, spike-haired kid locked under his arm. Jerpbak’s face was drained, the hard line of his mouth unsteady: he looked up at me and saw nothing.

  The nurse’s pen was poised, her head bent to yet another form. “Name?” she said, barely glancing up. Jerpbak stood before the desk, dazed, bewildered, his mouth working in agitation—there was a wild, urgent look in his eye, the look of the harried shopper bursting into the kitchen with four splitting sacks of groceries and no place to set them down. He’d lurched to a confused halt, bracing his legs to support the kid’s weight, right arm girdling the kid’s chest, left cradling his head: bloody Mary, bloody Jesus. The kid was unconscious. His leather jacket shone wet with blood, blood like oil, black and slickly glistening; his face looked as if it had been slathered with finger paint, as if a twenty-five-cent bamboo back scratcher had been dipped in a pot of gouty red enamel and raked over his eyelids, nose, cheekbones, mouth. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. I saw the lids roll back like defective shades, I saw the dull lifeless sheen of his eyes.

  “Goddammit!” Jerpbak leaned forward to slam the desk with the flat of his hand. “Are you alive or what?” He was addressing the nurse. Roaring at her. Barking out the question, his voice a primal yelp that cut through the nurse’s apathy like the physical threat it was: she’d seen it all, yes, and now she was seeing this. She sprang from her chair as if she’d been stung, took the room in five amazing strides and plunged through the emergency-room door like a diver. At the Game time, Jerpbak lost his grip on the inert kid and staggered forward with him, inadvertently slamming the kid’s body across the desk like a slab of boneless meat—if he hadn’t caught himself at the last second he would have fallen atop him. I heard the sound of an electric motor starting up somewhere down the corridor, the lights dimmed, then came back up. Jerpbak leaned over the prostrate kid like a beast over his bloody prey, breathing hard. Then he pushed himself up from the table as if he were doing a calisthenic, caught my eyes—his were punctured with shock—and reeled into the waiting room shouting incoherently.

  I saw the white flash of the janitor’s hair as he looked up from his mop, and then the young doctor pushed through the swinging doors and into the waiting room, his face rushing with hilarity as he rehearsed his stock of cops-and-robbers jokes. He looked first at Jerpbak, the grin turning quizzical, and then beyond him to where the kid’s limp form was flung across the desk.

  His face went cold. Forget the charm-school manners, the easy quips, pain with a smile: this was no joke. He was on the kid in an instant, a man with a thousand hands—checking for heartbeat, clearing nose and mouth, stanching the flow of blood—all the while shouting instructions over his shoulder. I watched as nurses, orderlies, aides—a hidden white-clad army—slammed through the door with a jangling gurney, descending on the kid like a snowstorm.

  Jerpbak, his uniform dark with the kid’s blood, stood at the doctor’s back, tugging abstractedly at his own stiff shirtcuffs. “He fell,” Jerpbak said, as if it mattered, “fell and hit his head.” The doctor gave him a quick sharp glance and then he was gone, the gurney squealing across the wet floor, voices parrying, the flurrying hands concentrated now on the kid’s face and head.

  The whole episode, beginning to end, had taken no more than sixty seconds. Jerpbak stood with his back to me, watching as the gurney was swallowed up in the embrace of the swinging doors. The night nurse had vanished; the janitor shook his head slowly and went back to swabbing the floor, erasing the gurney’s tracks with a sleepy dreamlike motion. The form I’d signed lay on the desk still, a single smear of blood cutting it in two. I lowered my head, put one foot in front of the other and walked down the hallway and out into the night.

  Amber light, red. Jerpbak’s patrol car stood at the curb, engine running, rack lights flashing. At first glance the car seemed empty, and I was shuffling toward the Toyota, thinking only to get out of there before Jerpbak turned his mind to other matters, when I was arrested by the pale glimmer of a face floating in the obscurity of the back-seat window. I saw the glint of an earring, the turned-up collar of a sad leather jacket like the one the kid had been wearing, a pair of pinned mournful eyes. I came closer. Behind the stark wire mesh of that back-seat prison I knew only too well, a second kid sat, the desolation of his face punctuated by the sickle-shaped bruise under his right eye. I stared at him. His tongue flicked out to lick a split lip, the radio crackled, the engine stuttered and then caught again. He was a tough guy, this kid, sixteen years old. He looked as if he’d been crying.

  When I stuck my head in the open driver’s window, I saw that the kid was handcuffed to the mesh. He said nothing. I said nothing. I reached in, twisted the ignition key and killed the engine. Then, the keys rattling in my hand like swords, like the fierce, sharp, stabbing edge of righteousness, I cocked my arm and pitched the wheeling clatter of them into the flat black envelope of the night.

  The Toyota drove itself. Down the ruptured drive and out onto the dark highway, the nasal blast of the exhaust setting shaded windows atremble, each shove of the gearshift rending the car’s guts anew:
I didn’t want to go back to the farm. Not yet. I didn’t want to look into Gesh’s drained and soot-blackened face, didn’t want to contemplate the razed shed, charred stubble, the big greedy bite the passing jaws had taken out of our lives. It was just past five. My conscious mind had shut down, but something deeper, some root calibrator of need, led me into the macadam parking lot outside the Circle K and on up to the dimly glowing phone booth that stood before it like a shrine: I suddenly knew what I was going to do.

  I fished through my wallet for the number, relayed the information to the operator in a voice so low she had to ask me to repeat myself, and listened to the suspenseful rhythms of longdistance connection—tap-a-tap-clicketa-click-click-click—as I cupped the receiver in my bandaged hands. It would be eight o’clock in New York.

  When at long last the line engaged—with a final, definitive and climactic click—my voice leapt into the void on the other end: “Hello?” I demanded. “Hello?”

  I got a recording: the number had been changed. I traced a pattern in the grime of the window as the operator dialed the new number and together we waited for the mice to stop running up and down the line. There was a distant ringing. Three thousand miles away Dwight lifted the receiver.

  “Hello, Dwight?” I blurted, barely able to contain myself through the operator’s preliminaries, “it’s me, Felix.” The words came in spate, I couldn’t get them out quickly enough: I was afraid he’d left for work already, was he okay, we’d had an accident. Yes, Phil. In the hospital. Burns. I was all right, yes, just a bit shaken up.