Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  We glanced around us as if an entire zoo were crouched in the bushes, eyes blazing, ears cocked, great pink tongues lapping at paws and hind ends. Then Phil straightened up, shrugged, and looked off down the road: the wonders of nature had an intense but short-lived appeal. We moved on.

  Surprisingly, the road began to level out farther on down the mountain, until finally we came upon a strip that showed evidence of recent use. The faint impress of tire tracks was visible beneath a grid of weed, and here and there a bush had been lopped or a tree limb severed. Moments later we came across a garbage-strewn path that intersected the road at a forty-five-degree angle and then plunged into a thicket as dense as something you’d expect to find in the Great Dismal Swamp. “What do you make of this?” I said, hesitating.

  Gesh grunted. The path was well worn, the bushes clipped back. “Jones,” he said.

  Jones. Enlightenment came like a blow to the back of the head. My pulse rate accelerated. Undifferentiated fears assailed me like bats exploding from a cave.

  Phil looked perplexed, as if we’d been talking in code. “Who?”

  “That dipshit farmer, remember? Somebody was up here last year, he said, somebody that was up to no good. Somebody named Jones.”

  “Or Smith,” I added, but Gesh was already lumbering through the undergrowth, striding along like a Bunyan, and I hurried to keep up. I don’t know what I expected to find—half-eaten human carcasses dangling from the trees, a cache of automatic weapons or an angel-dust factory—but I should have guessed. “Wait up,”

  Phil called. Weeds slapped at my face, a branch snagged the sleeve of my shirt. I focused on Gesh’s back, birds hissed in the trees, something darted off through the bushes, and suddenly we were standing at the edge of a sunlit clearing between walls of oak and laurel. I took it all in at a glance: the gray splintered tree stumps, the chicken-wire fencing, the sunken rims of the holes. Strips of corrugated aluminum had been driven into the ground at the base of the fence, as if at the border of some suburban zucchini patch, and hundreds of twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups littered the area, crushed underfoot, caught up in the roots of bushes, while deflated plastic bags advertised a Polk Street party supply house. There was garden hose, too, great sun-bleached coils of it, and crumpled half-empty sacks of fertilizer from which jagged clumps of weed had begun to sprout.

  Gesh stood in the midst of this desolation, hands on hips. Phil and I were spouting expletives and taking the name of God in vain. We were like children exposed to the ugly underbelly of Fantasyland, the dirt and grease and grinding gears beneath the pristine forest floor. “Pot!” I shouted, surprised at my own emotion. “The son of a bitch was growing pot up here and Vogelsang never said a word about it.”

  It was true, it was incontrovertible. If the Leakeys had problems interpreting the archaeological record at Olduvai, this was a snap—it couldn’t have been clearer had Jones left a diary with photographs. He’d used the Styrofoam cups to sprout his seedlings, and he’d dug the holes—as we would—to create a controlled environment for his maturing plants. But what went wrong? Or had it gone wrong? Maybe Jones was in Rio at that very moment, parading around in a Nixon mask and doing cocaine till his septum dissolved. I had a fleeting vision of palm trees, the girl from Ipanema, the mask, the cocaine and a water glass of dark Jamaican rum, but it was almost immediately supplanted by a vivid recollection of the Eldorado County Jail and the look of unreasoning hatred on Officer Jerpbak’s face.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Phil said, fishing a flat wooden object from the weeds. I saw rust, a spring and a coil of steel wire. It looked like a rat trap.

  “Looks like a rat trap,” Gesh said. I studied the ground. There must have been fifty of them in plain sight. I remembered the rats or squirrels I’d seen the first day—big brown things the size of footballs. There was a connection here, a nasty connection. But I wasn’t ready to make it.

  For the next ten minutes or so we poked around Jones’s growing area (Smith, Jones: was anybody really named Smith or Jones?), uncovering rat traps, checking the chicken wire fences, gazing up at the sky in an effort to gauge the area’s vulnerability to aerial detection. Then we continued along the road and discovered that it gradually wound back on itself and joined our driveway just below Sapers’s house. On the way back I said I didn’t like the fact that someone had tried to farm the place before us. Phil didn’t like it either. “I wish I knew whether Jones was lying on a beach in the Bahamas or out on bail,” he said. Gesh spat in the dirt. He was climbing the hill with his long loping strides, breathing hard. “At least we know where to put the fence up,” he said.

  Three nights later, after we’d refenced and cleared Jones’s plot (we dubbed it “Jonestown” by way of honoring our unknown predecessor and out of a perverse sense of humor that laughs in the face of its own defeat), we heard the sound of a well-tuned engine straining up the hill. All three of us were outside in the gathering dusk as Dowst’s sky-blue van lurched into the front yard and skidded to a halt. The first thing Dowst said was “Sorry I’m late,” as if he were overdue at a cocktail party. We said nothing. “I had to finish up this article on the walking-stick cholla for The Cactus and Succulent Journal, and I just got buried in my notes.” He shrugged. “Well, listen: I hope you can appreciate my position—I had to deliver on time and there were no two ways about it. I’m sorry.”

  He looked like a page out of an L. L. Bean catalogue: fisherman’s sweater, duck hunter’s vest, skeet shooter’s cap. We regarded him with unremitting hatred. He’d been writing articles and we’d been stringing wire.

  “So,” he said, clapping his hands and rubbing the palms together as if they were wet, “I see you’ve got the greenhouse up.”

  Our heads turned like beads on a string. The greenhouse sat in the corner of the yard like the centerpiece in an exhibition of avant-garde sculpture, its camouflage colors disguising it about as effectively as the brick-oven red of my Toyota. “Yeah,” Gesh said finally, turning to Dowst, “no thanks to you.”

  That night we sat around the stove, smoking the pot Dowst had brought Us, examining the Skippy jars full of seeds that would make us our fortune, and listening to Dowst’s assurances that everything was all right and that the few days we’d lost really wouldn’t matter in the long run. The resentment we’d felt when he first stepped from the van had begun to wane, and Phil broke the ice socially by offering him some of the corn chowder he’d been boiling for the past three days. Dowst feigned a grateful smile and said he’d already eaten. I told him he could sleep on the couch, but he said he’d just as soon sleep in the van—which he’d equipped, incidentally, like a pimpmobile, with cherrywood paneling and shag carpet. “Okay,” I said, “have it your way.”

  In the morning we found ourselves in the front yard, lined up like refugees and licking egg yolk from the corners of our mouths, while Dowst plied his shovel in an exemplary and instructive way. The air was dank. A crow jeered from the rooftop. We listened to the hiss and scrape of the shovel, the sudden sharp clamor of metal and stone. We watched Dowst’s flailing elbows, his sure foot, we counted the seams in his designer jeans. And then, when he stood back, wiping the sweat from his brow with a red bandanna, we edged forward, silent, curious, awed and disgruntled, to contemplate the model hole.

  Chapter 4

  I was against it. Gesh was for it. Phil wavered. But when we came within sight of Shirelle’s Bum Steer, the bed of the pickup loaded to the gunwales with groceries, twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups, half-gallon bottles of vodka, seam-split sacks of worm castings and steer manure, three rolls of chicken wire and a battery-powered Japanese tape player Gesh had picked up at a yard sale, Phil braked, downshifted and spun the wheel, and we rumbled into the parking lot like Okies on parade, lurching to a halt beneath the sorry bumper-blasted oak that presided over the place in long-suffering martyrdom.

  There were three other cars in the lot: two mud-caked Chevy pickups and a Plymouth Duster with bad springs. A dog that looked like a cro
ss between a malamute and a hyena regarded us steadily from the bed of the nearer pickup. “Just one,” Phil said, holding up a finger and draining a can of Coors in a single motion.

  “Or two,” Gesh grinned.

  “Okay,” I said, gulping down my beer. “But remember what Dowst said.”

  “Fuck Dowst.”

  “No, really—we can’t be too careful.”

  “Loose lips sink ships,” Phil said, swinging out the driver’s door.

  “Right on,” Gesh shouted, drumming at my shoulder blades as I heaved open the door and flung myself from the cab.

  For a moment we just stood there in the glutinous muck of the parking lot, the hyena-dog’s yellow eyes locked on us, the tavern door as forbidding as the gates of Gehenna. We were feeling guilty. Dowst had laid down the law, ex cathedra—we were to pick up the groceries and supplies and head directly home. No stopping. Not at diners, bars, burger stands—not even at the post office. It was absolutely essential that we keep a low profile, talk to no one, remain anonymous and invisible. You strike up a friendly conversation—with the checkout girl, the man at the Exxon station, the old lady peddling stamps at the post office—and you’re dead. Dowst assured us, with Puritan solemnity, that the locals could spot a dope farmer a mile off.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Phil said.

  I studied the dog, the scarred tree, the massive weathered windowless slab of redwood that barred the entrance to Shirelle’s inner sanctum. The Duster, listing to the right, sported a bumper sticker that proclaimed: I’M MORAL. It looked like rain. “Yeah, I guess we shouldn’t,” I said.

  “Shit,” Gesh said. Nobody moved.

  In that instant the decision was taken out of our hands. The door suddenly burst open and a woman emerged, an aluminum beer keg cradled in her arms like the decapitated head of a lover. She was in her early forties, dressed in black spandex pants, a lacy Victorian blouse and a pair of aniline-orange spike heels, with ankle straps. I registered bosom, flank, false eyelashes and a shade of mascara that was meant to coordinate with the shoes. There was a moment of hesitation as she locked eyes with us; then she flashed us a smile, tossed the empty keg down outside the door and invited us in. “Goddamn,” she said, and it was almost a bark, “you guys going to stand out here all afternoon or come on in and join us?”

  Inside it was dark as a closet, the windows grimed over, a few feeble yellow bulbs glowing here and there. Two men sat at the bar, hunched over beers; three others slouched at a table in the back, their faces ghoulish in the blue light of the jukebox. All five were wearing straw hats worked into nasty, rapierlike peaks, work shirts, Levi’s and boots. They shared a look compounded of shock, indignation and irascibility in equal portions, as if we were the last thing they expected to encounter in the shadowy depths of Shirelle’s, and the first thing they’d like to stamp the life out of, followed by rattlesnakes, rats and weasels, in that order.

  Shirelle ducked behind the bar, wiped her hands on a dirty towel and gave us a pert, expectant look. We were milling around, searching our pockets, shuffling our feet. The jukebox thundered with the strains of hillbilly-trucker music: Don’t let your cowboys grow up to be babies and Tears in my beers, can’t keep a bead up over you. Gesh ordered shots of rye and beer chasers. We sat. Gallon jars of pickled eggs confronted us, a faded souvenir pennant from the Seattle World’s Fair, dusty bottles of Bols créeGme de menthe, Rock & Rye and persimmon liqueur. The bar was smooth as a salt lick with generations of abrasion, the soft sure polish of sleeves and elbows. We threw down our shots like mean hombres and then took economical little sips of beer.

  Shirelle leaned back against the cash register and lit a cigarette. “Haven’t seen you guys before,” she said. “Just passing through?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Gesh said.

  “We’re heading over to Covelo,” Phil said, working a country twang into his voice.

  “Covelo?” Covelo was the end of the road, a hamlet that gave on to Indian reservation, national forest, mountain. No one but game wardens and liquor salesmen went there.

  Phil leaned across the bar, confidential. “We’ve got a load of smallpox-infested blankets for the Indians.”

  Shirelle stared at him for a minute, blank as an oil drum, and then she let out a whoop of laughter so sharp and sudden it made me spill my beer. No one else cracked a smile. The faces by the jukebox drew together, beaked, craggy, a glimmer of blue-black Indian hair. Shirelle laughed like a woman who’s not responsible for her actions, breaking off to hack into a fist glittering with painted nails. She laughed till tears dissolved her makeup. Moles appeared out of nowhere, lines tore at her eyes. “Hey,” she gasped finally, “let me buy you another one, you funny guy,” and she reached out to pinch Phil’s cheek.

  An hour later I reached for my wallet and spilled a pocketful of change on the floor. I waved at it vaguely, and then slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar. “Another round,” I said. Shirelle and Phil were dancing, their groins locked like machine parts. Gesh was shooting pool with the Indians in back, and I was engaged in conversation with George Pete Turner at the bar. I was also leering shamelessly at Shirelle’s daughter, who’d been summoned from the house to help the other customers while her mother helped Phil.

  The daughter’s name was Savoy—surname Skaggs, as George Pete informed me. Delbert Skaggs had left Shirelle ten years back to run off to Eureka with the Cudahy twins, Natalie and Norma. Turner was squinting at me through a haze of Tareyton smoke, his voice low and confidential. There was more to the saga, but I wasn’t listening. No. I was down from the hills, back from exile, and I was ogling Savoy’s butt with all the mendicant passion of a Charlie Chaplin, out at the elbows, pressing his nose to a plate-glass window rife with cream puffs and napoleons. The girl couldn’t have been eighteen, let alone twenty-one. But she looked good. Very good. Golden arms, a low-cut sweater top, violet eyes—one just slightly but noticeably smaller than the other. She caught me staring, and I asked her where she’d got her locket from.

  “This?” She fished the gold heart from her cleavage and stared down at it as if she’d never seen it before. Then she giggled, showing small even teeth and an expanse of healthy pink gum. “Eugene gave it to me before he went into the army.” George Pete Turner’s whiskery face hung at my shoulder like a salami in a delicatessen. He was nodding in confirmation. “He’s stationed in Germany,” she said. “Wiesbaden.” She pronounced it wheeze.

  I didn’t know what to say. I watched her as she carefully set the three sizzling beers down on coasters and lined up the shot glasses, cocked her wrist and expertly topped them off. “Nice,” I said.

  “Did I tell you that Ted Turner in Georgia—the tee-vee magnet—he’s my second cousin?” George Pete’s voice had a nagging edge to it, each word a desperate raking claw fighting for a toehold. He was talking to the side of my face. I ignored him.

  Savoy leaned over the bar and arranged the shot glasses in a neat little circle before me, the locket dangling enticingly from her throat. I could smell her perfume. Behind me I heard the click of the pool balls and a voice I recognized in a moment of epiphany as Phil’s, singing along with the jukebox. “Satin sheets to lie on,” he crooned, every bit as passionate and downhome as George Jones or Merle Haggard, “Satin pillows to cry on.” I don’t know what came over me, but I reached for the locket.

  “Hey,” Savoy said, pulling back in slow motion, chin lifting to expose the unbroken white line of her throat.

  My hand traveled with her, the button of gold pinched between my thumb and forefinger, the palm of my hand coming into inevitable contact with her breast as she straightened up. I was leaning over the bar. My hand was on her breast and I had her by the locket. “Nice,” I said again, stupidly. “Very nice.” She was grinning. George Pete’s eyes were like raging bulls, and I felt suddenly, with all the clarity of Cassandra, that something unpleasant was about to happen.

  I was right.

  The door swu
ng back with a shriek and Lloyd Sapers lurched into the barroom, so drunk his feet failed him and he slammed off the doorjamb like an errant cueball. Our eyes met. I dropped locket and breast, looked away, looked back again. In that instant of looking away, a shape had obliterated the doorway, hulking shoulders, belly, head, hands like catcher’s mitts, feet of iron: Marlon.

  Gesh and the Indians had paused over their pool game—elimination—Gesh arrested in the act of lining up a shot, cuestick bisecting the bridge of his fingers, angles mentally cut. He looked up at the door with a quizzical expression, as if he’d just turned a corner and found himself in the middle of a parade. Phil, entirely oblivious, had worked Shirelle up against the jukebox and was grinding away at her like an escaped sex offender.

  “Well, Jesus H. Christ and all the saints and martyrs,” Sapers roared. “If it ain’t the teetotalers.”

  At that moment, George Pete Turner—he was, I later learned, the prospective father-in-law, sire to the absent doughboy and guardian of the family jewels—hit me in the left ear and knocked me from the bar stool. I made a four-point landing, on hands and knees, in a puddle of beer. Lloyd Sapers laughed. I’d been blind-sided, sucker-punched, humiliated. Crouched there, poised between mercy and grief, I could hear the fearful grinding of the earth as it slipped round its axis. And then the shadow of Sapers’s son fell over me and I knew I was doomed.

  When I came out of my cringe I saw that George Pete Turner was being restrained by his drinking companion, a toothless beardy old sot who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, and that Marlon, who was merely blinking curiously at me, had the face of a fleshy Boy Scout. Savoy had emitted a short truncated gasp and then faded to the far corner of the bar, Phil was glancing over his shoulder in surprise, Shirelle’s eyes were abandoning the smokiness of passion and hardening for action, and Gesh was advancing on the bar, gripping his cuestick like a Louisville Slugger. The Indians were ice statues, drinks locked in their hands like glacial excrescences, and Johnny Cash, his basso rattling the glasses on the shelves, was letting me know that he, too, walked the line. And then, as quickly as it had erupted, it was over.