Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She was agile, urgent, pouring from the car in a spill of flesh. Nike sneakers, satiny blue jogger’s shorts, a halter that left her shoulders and navel bare. Gesh had momentarily jolted awake as I rumbled up onto the shoulder, but now he drifted off again, snores ratchetting mechanically through his dried-up nostrils. I stepped out of the car.

  “Oh, listen, thanks a lot,” she gasped, snatching for breath like a miler. “I’m really glad somebody stopped—have you got a jack?”

  She was standing directly in front of me now, too close in her urgency, shoulders shrugged and palms spread in entreaty. Her mouth was wide, nose cut like an L, skin dark. Italian, I thought. Or Greek.

  “Because I don’t know what happened to mine. I must’ve loaned it to somebody or something. Anyway, I’ve got a spare, and if you could just let me borrow your jack for a minute …”

  I realized I’d been staring at her like a deaf-mute under sedation, and wrenched my face into a broad grin. “Sure, of course, no problem,” I barked, swinging round to work open the trunk.

  “I hit something about three miles back,” she explained, peering into the trunk full of fast-food wrappers, rags, laundry, tools, cans of spray paint, torn tennis sneakers, and lurid paperbacks. “I figured I could limp into town, but then the rim started to go on me and all of a sudden the car was shaking like a roller coaster or something. Well, that was it. I started to get afraid for my pieces …”

  I glanced up inquisitively, jack in hand.

  “My pottery. I’m a potter. In Willits?” She took the jack from me as casually as if I were handing her a canapéeA at a cocktail party. “I’m right on Oak Street—it’s just a little place, Petra’s Pots. Between the real-estate office and the barbershop.”

  A mobile home the size of a DC-7 rumbled by as she bent to maneuver the jack under the frame of the VW and give the jack handle two quick twists. I stood above her, watching the coils of hair play across her bare shoulders, and then peered through the window of her car and saw that the back seat was stacked with flats of ceramic mugs and matching cream-and-sugar sets. Larger pieces—they could have been bongs or samovars for all I knew—were wrapped in newspaper and wedged into the floor space on the passenger’s side. “Need any help?” I asked.

  She was squatting beside the wheel now, fitting the cruciform wrench to the first of the wheel lugs, and she paused to glance up at me with a wide white smile: “No, thanks,” she said, “I’m not the helpless type.” Then she turned back to her work, and I watched her arms harden as she fought the lug. It wouldn’t give. She strained until her shoulders began to tremble, then rose to her feet for better purchase.

  “You’re supposed to spit on your hands,” I said, and she laughed.

  Then she attacked the recalcitrant lug once more, throwing her entire body into it, teeth gritted, eyes clenched, halter bursting. Nothing. I watched her smugly, greedily—it was my right and privilege to study this beautiful woman, this stranger, because my stopping to help had forced us into an intimacy of purpose, and I knew it would be only a matter of moments before she would turn to me for the muscle she lacked. “Wow,” she said finally, “that’s a bitch,” and she stood to wipe her hands on her shorts.

  “Mind if I give it a try?” I said, arms folded across my chest.

  “It must be frozen on,” she said. “You know, rusted,” but she was smiling softly, capitulating, and we both recognized that she was yielding ground, casting off the mantle of the woman warrior, if only for a moment.

  As I bent to the wheel, I asked her if she was from Buffalo or Rochester, having detected a trace of vowel strangulation in her accent. “I was just curious,” I added. “I’ve got a lot of friends from up around there.”

  “Chicago,” she said, flattening the a. “My name’s Petra, but I guess I already told you that.”

  I smiled up at her, gripping the prongs of the lugwrench like Samson fastening on the jawbone of an ass, introduced myself in a gasp and gave the wrench a mighty jerk. Nothing happened. “Tight,” I grunted, flexing the muscles in my back.

  “You from around here?” she said.

  I jerked at the lug. It was immovable. With exaggerated care, as though the tool must be defective, I slipped the wrench from the lug and studied it.

  “I mean,” she prompted, “you look familiar to me.”

  “Oh,” I said, judiciously fitting the wrench to another lug and preparing to slip every disc, rupture every muscle, and herniate myself into the bargain with one murderous herculean thrust, “not really. We live in Palo Alto, actually. But we just”—I broke off to jerk savagely at the wrench—“but we just like come up on weekends to go, to go”—I was running sweat, furious, distracted, and I nearly shouted the final word—“fishing.”

  “Looks like it’s really on there, huh?”

  “No, no,” I said, bracing myself for another try, “don’t worry. It’s just”—again I heaved till I thought I could feel something give in my groin—“stuck, that’s all.”

  It was at that moment, as if it had been choreographed by the Fates, as if all the hands of all the clocks that had measured time throughout history had been synchronized to mock that instant on that road on that day—it was then, when my guard was down and my passions piqued—that the CHP cruiser, revolving light aglow, glided silently up onto the shoulder behind us. I froze. Became a sculpture in living flesh: Man Changing Flat. Petra glanced up at the opaque window of the police car and put her hands to her hips.

  The door of the car swung open and a glistening boot appeared. Then, six-two, one-eighty-five, as lean and tough as a strip of jerky and with every hair of his mustache clipped to regulation length, Officer Jerpbak emerged from the cruiser. He was carrying his summons book in one hand, and his mirror shades flashed malevolently. “What’s the problem here?”

  “Nothing we can’t fix ourselves,” Petra said. Her voice had turned acid.

  A pickup rattled by on the road, cloely tailed by a convertible that lurched into the outside lane with a blast of the throttle and then vanished in the distance. I straightened up—slowly, cautiously—still gripping the lugwrench and wondering what to do. Should I avert my face, throw my voice, drop the wrench and stroll casually back to the Toyota, start it up and drive off? The wrench weighed twelve tons, my heart was in my ears. Here he was, at long last, Jerpbak. Jerpbak the enforcer, Jerpbak the hound. In the flesh. “It’s just a flat tire, Officer,” I said, my voice hollow, withered, gone flat and out of key.

  “Well,” said Jerpbak, ignoring me, “Miss Pandazopolos.” He sauntered up to the VW, put a foot on the bumper and thumbed through his summons book. “And her junk-wagon.”

  “Oh, come on—get off my case, Jerpbak.” She flattened the final vowel until it trailed off in a bleat.

  If to this point Jerpbak had seemed faintly amused, in the way of a nine-year-old with a bare wire and a pan of frogs, he turned abruptly serious. “In the car, lady,” he snapped. “I’m conducting a spot inspection of this vehicle right here and now.”

  Petra fixed him with a stare of such intense, incendiary hatred I thought he’d burst into flame, and I realized with a thrill that she and I—that this fantastic, wide-mouthed, long-legged, dark-skinned, furious woman and I—had a bond in common. She opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jerpbak, impenetrable behind his shades, was already scribbling in his summons book, and she stalked round the car and slammed into the driver’s seat instead.

  At this point, Jerpbak turned to me. “And who are you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  “I’m nobody. I mean I, uh, just stopped to help when I, uh—?”

  “You a local?”

  “Me? No, no. Just passing through, never been here before in my life. I live in San Jose. With my mother.”

  “Funny,” Jerpbak said, scratching meditatively in the dirt with the toe of his boot, “you look familiar.” And then he hit me with the question that gave me nightmares: “Ever been to Tahoe?” />
  “Where?”

  “You hard of hearing? Tahoe. Lake Tahoe.”

  Shit, I thought, and I felt something give way, a piece of elastic frayed to the breaking point. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been there.” And then: “Look, what’s this all about, anyway? You charging me with being a good Samaritan or what?”

  There was a long silence. Jerpbak’s glasses were like the eyes of a predacious insect, huge, soulless, unfathomable. Drums thundered in my head, my chest was exploding, a truck shot by with a climactic whoosh. “I don’t like you,” Jerpbak said finally. “I don’t like your shirt or your shoes or your haircut or the tone of your voice. In fact, I like you so little that if you’re not in that piece-of-shit Toyota and out of here in thirty seconds flat, I am going to run your ass in. Don’t tempt me.” Then he turned his back: I was dismissed.

  Jerpbak was hovering over Petra’s window now. She stared straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. “License and registration,” Jerpbak said. She didn’t move. He repeated himself.

  Petra’s voice was soft. “Don’t do this,” she said.

  “License and registration.”

  “All right,” she said. “I forgot my license. It’s at home somewhere.”

  I watched the back of Jerpbak’s head, studied the square of his shoulders. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take you in then,” he said. Take her in? I was stunned. The man’s psychotic, I thought. A bullyboy. A brownshirt.

  “Shit!” Petra shouted, flinging herself from the car. “You know goddamn well I have a license—you’ve harassed me enough over it, haven’t you? How many tickets have you given me in the last three months? Huh? What do you mean I don’t have a license?” She was six inches from him, veins standing out in her neck, eyes throwing punches.

  Jerpbak never flinched. He just stood there, erect as a ramrod, idly fingering the buffed leather of his holster and the hard plastic grip of his revolver. His voice was almost weary. “Up against the car,” he said.

  She hesitated; he grabbed for her arm. Just that: he grabbed for her arm, and then spun her around. I don’t know what came over me—some misguided chivalric impulse, I suppose, or perhaps it was even more basic than that, something archetypal, primordial. Kill, fuck, eat, the id tells us, and sometimes we listen. In this instance it was all tied up with sex, of course. Would I have interfered if Petra had looked like Edith Sitwell or Nancy Reagan? I stepped forward. I think I said something penetrating like “Hey, no need to get rough,” and I may have reached out with the hazy notion of restraining Jerpbak’s arm—or no, I merely brushed him, that’s all. Accidentally.

  Brushing, restraining—I could have clubbed him with the lug-wrench and it wouldn’t have been any different. One hundred and twenty seconds later I found myself handcuffed to Petra and seated in the rear of the cruiser, my wrist aching, knees cramped, heart hammering, and facing a probable string of charges ranging from interfering with a peace officer in the line of duty to assault, mayhem and attempted murder. The police radio chattered tonelessly, inanely, sun screamed through the windows. I watched as Jerpbak sauntered up to the Toyota and shook Gesh awake. I was as wrought up as a pit bull with blood in his nostrils.

  Petra’s free hand reached out to pat my shackled one. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were wide and wet, stricken like the eyes of tear-gas victims. “It’s just that … this guy is crazy. He thinks that I … he, he persecutes me.” She leaned into me, and I could feel her body percolating with hurt and anger until the first sob rose in her throat. A moment later she broke down, sobs churning like waves on a beach, the very frame of the car heaving with the force of her emotion. I’d been thinking wildly of escape, of smashing Jerpbak and running for it, and then more somberly of lawyers and jail cells, the collapse of the summer camp and of how now, finally and irrevocably, I’d let my partners down—thinking of my own circumscribed and miserable self. Now, without thought or hesitation, as instinctively as I would reach out a hand to someone who’d fallen or hold open the door for a child with an armful of groceries, I drew up my free hand to take her shoulder and press her to me. What else could I have done?

  Chapter 4

  I was advised of my rights, photographed, fingerprinted, relieved of my personal property and consigned to the local jail, where I was escorted to a communal cell occupied by two happy-hour drunks, an acne-ravaged shoplifter, a vagrant Indian, and a middle-aged man who had assaulted his seventy-five-year-old mother in a dispute over a can of sugar-free Dr Pepper. I was charged with interfering with the duties of a peace officer and assault and battery. Bail was set at $2,000.

  The cell was big, fitted out with Murphy cots, tile floor (easy to hose down, like a cage at the zoo), and two crappers. The Indian—I thought at first he might have been one of the pool players from Shirelle’s—was leaning against the bars, dragging on a cigarette, as I stumbled into the cell. A toothpick jutted from his mouth, and his eyes were like cups of blood. The others sat or lay on their cots in silence, gripped by the peculiar lassitude that sets in when the cell door clanks shut and you find yourself locked away and powerless. After a moment the Indian nodded at me and said, “What they get you for?”

  I was feeling stupid, ashamed, guilty. I’d acted impulsively, foolishly, replaying my first encounter with Jerpbak to the letter, déeAjéaG vu. I wanted to hang myself, throttle Jerpbak, make love to Petra, Chinowa, poor dead Annie, I wanted to sit around the table at the summer camp and drink gin rickeys with Phil and Gesh and even Dowst; I did not want to hunker down behind the broomhandle-thick bars of the Willits jail and open up my heart to a vagrant Indian. “Murder,” I said.

  The Indian’s lower lip protruded until it entirely obscured the upper, and he nodded his head slowly and solemnly. No one else said a word to me until Phil came to bail me out six hours later.

  Six hours. For six hours I lay on my cot and listened to the tortured ratchetting snores of the drunks and the mea culpas of the mother-beater ("Mama,” he moaned at regular intervals, “Mama, forgive me"); for six hours I reflected on my crime and its consequences for the summer camp, and tried to focus the image of Petra, already dissolving in my memory like a teaspoon of sugar in a water tank. There were the distant echoes of footsteps, blown noses, cleared throats. A single yellow bulb burned in the hallway. “What they get you for?” the Indian asked the shoplifter.

  In the car on the way in, and while we sat shackled wrist to wrist in the anteroom of the Willits Police Department, Petra had given me an insight into Jerpbak that made my blood boil. Not that I wasn’t already coddling with fear, excitement and rage, my nervous system like a leaky gas jet over which someone was fumbling with a pack of matches, but this was a real provocation, this was heinous: Jerpbak had sexually harassed her. I was outraged and disgusted. He was no ascetic, no true believer—he was venal, an extortionist, an amatorial strong-arm man. He was a sinner like the rest of us.

  It seemed that Petra had first run afoul of him shortly after he’d been transferred to the eastern Mendocino region. He’d stopped her for a routine check, stopped her because he was bored, because she was a pretty girl and he was a lean, tough, sinewy, head-cracking, doper-busting, macho highway patrolman. I pictured him—the jackbooted swagger, the short-sleeved shirt with the chevron on the shoulder, the iron triceps and rigid spine—as he ambled up to the car. Petra was ready for him. She held out her license and registration like offerings, like tribute, and concentrated on the nervous chatter of her car’s engine. “What’s this?” he said, stooping to lean in the window and slip back his sunglasses like a knight lifting his visor. “My license and registration,” Petra said, glancing up at him. His hair was fine, parted at the side and cut close in what used to be called a regular haircut; equally fine hairs flattened along his forearm as a truck whooshed by on the highway. “I don’t want to see those,” he said, holding her eyes. “I just want to chat a minute, that’s all.”

  He chatted. Came on strong, made a stab at wit (Petra didn’t elaborate, but
I could guess what passed for wit in Jerpbak’s circle—adolescent double entendre gleaned from sitcoms and game shows). Petra didn’t respond. “Can I go now?” she asked finally.

  Jerpbak again held her eyes, Jerpbak the hound, the married man, the former star halfback, and lowered his voice to a seductive whisper: “Only if you’ll let me take you to dinner some night this week.”

  Three days later he appeared in her shop. “Hi,” he said, dressed in civvies that looked like a uniform—white pants, polo shirt, the inevitable shades. “Remember me?” She again rebuffed him, and he stormed out of the shop like a wounded buffalo; thereafter, Petra was prominent on his shitlist. In due course he discovered that in addition to making mugs, saucers, plates, cream and sugar dispensers, flower pots, bowls and pickle trays, she also made stoneware bongs for a head shop in San Francisco. This gave him a foothold, an angle, a justification for putting pressure on her. She was now, in his view, a blot on the community, an undesirable engaged in an activity if not actually illegal, then certainly reprehensible and corrupting.

  Shortly thereafter he stopped her as she was driving off to an arts and crafts fair, her Volkswagen laden with bulky frangible pieces, and conducted a search of the car while writing out a sheaf of violations. He asked her if she wasn’t aware that narcotics implements such as she produced were commonly used by minors. He asked her if she had no sense of morals or community responsibility. Finally, after she’d been delayed over half an hour and was exasperated to the point of tears, he offered to tear up the tickets if she’d agree to go out with him just once. She refused. “All right,” he said, sunglasses snapped down to shield his face as if he were preparing for battle, “but you’re going to regret it.”