Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I looked around me and saw the colors of the earth. Muted browns, sienna, umber, the palest of yellows. I saw Boston fern, philodendron, wandering Jew, myrtle and jade. I saw pottery—vases, planters, tureens, amphorae, urns, earthenware cups, glasses, pitchers, plates, finger bowls. There were ceramic bells and windchimes, massive cookpots, diminutive snuffboxes. And all arranged with taste and discrimination, set out on shelves, sideboards, a huge walnut table with place settings for eight and a delicate faience vase of cut flowers as a centerpiece. I felt as if I’d stepped into a bower, a bedroom, a church. I pushed my hair back, wiped my sweating palms on the thighs of my pants and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  I listened to kyrie eleisons, examined this pot or that, discovered a fat orange cat and stroked its ears. Then I noticed a smaller bell, the familiar businesslike tinny sort of thing I’ve always associated with elementary school classrooms and hotel lobbies. I depressed the plunger—bing-bing, bing-bing—and was rewarded, a moment later, by the appearance of Petra.

  She emerged from a door at the rear of the shop, dressed in a smock that flowed from her like a gown. She was barefoot, and a thin silver chain cut a V at her throat. I watched her official smile give way to a look of misplaced recognition. “Hi,” I said.

  “Oh,” she murmured, stalling for time like a game-show contestant who’s just been shown, for the purpose of identification, the monumental color slide of a bearded president. “Hi.”

  We smiled at one another.

  “Fred?” she said.

  “Felix,” I corrected.

  “Felix,” she said.

  I told her I’d dropped in to see how she was doing. She said she was doing fine and asked me how the fishing was. Her teeth were white, flawless, like something out of a toothpaste ad. “Fishing?” I repeated, puzzled, caught off guard, thinking of teeth and lips and the ache of enforced celibacy, until I remembered the lame story I’d concocted over the jack handle on that eventful evening a month back. “Lunkers,” I blurted, “we’ve been catching lunkers. Yellowtails, guppies and monkey-faced eels.”

  To my relief, she laughed, and then turned to lift a ceramic teapot from a hot plate and offer me a cup of herb tea (rose hips or some such crap, which I detest and normally refuse, but managed somehow to accept gracefully). And then, stirring our tea, something magical happened—in a single leap we were able to extricate ourselves from the slough of trivia and small talk, and focus on the subject that bound us in intimacy: Jerpbak. Jerpbak, our mutual tormentor and bitterest enemy, our jailer, the agent that had brought us together, wed us, bound us flesh to flesh. I watched her eyes over the teacup and saw the back seat of Jerpbak’s cruiser. “Is he still bothering you?” I said.

  She shook her head. We were sitting at the big walnut table holding ceramic cups, while cars rushed by the window and Bach marched steadily forward, taking little figures and swelling them to great ones. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Not since … well, not since I saw you last. I mean, when we met.” She coughed into her fist and colored a bit.

  I waved my hand as if to say It’s no big deal, I’m glad I stopped, I’d do it again anytime, swim out to Alcatraz and do thirty years in the federal pen for a glance from you, babe, and told her—with all the flourishes—of my scrape with Jerpbak at the Eldorado County jail.

  “God, that guy is nuts,” she said. “He’s not responsible for his actions. If they don’t do something with him he’s going to hurt somebody one of these days.” She took a short angry sip of her tea. “Do you think he recognized you?”

  “Who cares?” I said, hot and reckless, the tough guy, and then tried to shrug the whole thing off by telling her I’d got hold of a lawyer (which was true) who had assured me I would get off on all counts (not true), as I really hadn’t done anything, when you came right down to it (also true).

  “You were acting like a rational human being, that’s all,” she said, fixing me with the kind of look Joan of Arc must have taken into battle with her. “I’ll testify to that.”

  We sat there a moment in silence, brooding over the wrongs done us, and then she observed that the whole thing was ironic in a way.

  “Ironic?”

  “Yes, well,” she said, lowering her eyes, “I was the cause of the whole mess, and I actually got off easier than you. A lot easier. Compared to what you went through, I was lucky.” The resisting arrest charge, it seemed, had merely been a threat, and Jerpbak had not followed through on it. She’d been booked and then released on the promise of returning in the morning with her license, and given forty-eight hours to correct the defects Jerpbak had ferreted out in the antique hulk of her VW Bug—from improperly displayed license plates to inoperable signal lights and eviscerated muffler—in lieu of paying the fines. It had cost her a hundred and twenty dollars in repair bills, she said, but at least she was free of it. And then her voice dropped to a whisper and she gave me the sort of look only martyrs nailed to the cross have a right to hope for: “I’m really sorry you had to get involved. If there’s anything I can do …”

  There was plenty she could do, I thought, in terms of local anesthesia and release of tension, and to avoid leering at her—she was feeling sorry for me, feeling sorry and grateful, and I didn’t want to blow it by leaping at her like a sex maniac—I looked at my watch. It was one-thirty. Lunchtime. While I debated asking her to lunch (no doubt she’d already nibbled an alfalfa-sprout-and-feta-cheese sandwich while hunched over the potter’s wheel), I bought a vase I couldn’t afford, thinking I’d use it to enliven the déeAcor at the summer camp or else ship it to my ninety-year-old maiden aunt in Buffalo.

  “You sure you want this?” Petra asked me.

  I nodded vigorously, mumbling something banal about the quality of the craftsmanship and the intricacy of the design.

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “A vase,” I said.

  She laughed—a short, toothy, ingenuous laugh—and then informed me that it was a funerary urn. “For ashes.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you got me. I was going to put flowers in it.” I held up a qualifying finger. “Dead flowers.”

  I was the soul of wit. We laughed together. She poured me a second cup of the wretched acidic tea (it tasted like a petroleum derivative) and asked if I’d like to see her workshop. “We’ll call it an educational tour,” she said, rising from the table.

  I followed her into a brilliantly lit back room—cement floor, lath-and-plaster walls, high banks of gymnasium windows. It was hotter back here and the place smelled strongly of the clay that dominated it, coating everything in a fine thin layer, like volcanic ash or the residue of a dust storm. Petra took me round the room in a slow sweeping arc, pointing out the plastic bags of clay, the potter’s wheel, her kiln the size of a gingerbread house, the buckets of glazes and the greenware in the drier. I smelled the ferment of the earth, fingered the clay and marveled at its moistness and plasticity; I saw her in her smock and her bare feet and felt I knew her. When I thought I’d seen everything and was trying to wrest the flow of the conversation from ceramics and push it in the direction of lunch, she gave me an odd look—eyes half-lidded, lips curled in a serene inscrutable smile—and asked if I’d like to see her real work.

  “Real work?” I echoed. The room was as still and dry as an ancient riverbed; pots uncountable and in every phase of production littered the floor, the makeshift shelves, the drying racks and firing trays. I was puzzled.

  She crooked her finger and I followed her—she in jogger’s shorts, her long naked legs leaping from the cutaway smock, me in my least offensive T-shirt and most imbecilic smile—to a doorway at the far end of the room. I’d seen the door earlier and taken it for a closet, but now she flipped a light switch and led me into still another room. Perhaps the blandness of the workroom and my growing preoccupation with lunch had lulled me, but this was a surprise: suddenly I found myself amidst a host of strange figures, colors that pulsed, glazes that dazzled. If the shop was a potter’s
paradise, then this was the treasury of the gods. Or no: this was the dwarf kingdom. Bearded, mustachioed, long-eared and thick-browed, fifty faces leered at mine, their expressions crazed, demented, vacant. Human figures, two-thirds scale, stood, sat and crouched round the room, their heads pointed, eyes veiled, lips curled with private smiles or fat with the defective’s pout. It was like being on a subway in Manhattan. I laughed.

  Petra seemed relieved. She was grinning. “You like them?”

  I was making various marveling noises—tongue clucks, throaty exclamations of wonder, giggles that rose in crescendo to choke off at the top. I stroked the slick, brightly glazed dunce cap of a man perched on the edge of a park bench and reading a newspaper. “Todd Browning,” I said. “Fellini.”

  She nodded. “And Viola Frey. And Robert Arneson.”

  “And you,” I said.

  “And me.”

  A trio in buskins and leotards—men? women?—groped for a ball suspended from a string; a child with the drooping features of Leonid Brezhnev played at jacks. “These are great,” I said, unraveling my arm to indicate the full range of them. “They’re hilarious and weird, they’re grotesque. Has anybody seen them?”

  Petra was leaning against an enormously fat woman in a bridal gown decorated with dancing fishes. “A few people,” she said, and I felt a surge of exhilaration (she was showing them to me, I was one of the chosen) and a corresponding jolt of jealousy (to whom else had she shown them?). Pots and creamers and orange-juice pitchers were okay, she said after a moment, and she enjoyed doing them—but she was an artist, too, and these pieces were an expression of that side of her. She was collecting them for a show in San Francisco.

  I asked her if she knew anything about metal sculpture, and then if she’d ever heard of Phil Cherniske. “He does—he did—these big preposterous things in metal,” I said. “He used to be known as Phil Yonkers?”

  She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, looked distracted, but she said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then: “Have you had lunch yet?”

  “No,” the word a hurtling shell, my lips the barrel of an artillery gun, “no, I haven’t.”

  “Because I was going to close early—now, in fact—and go to a barbecue at this little country bar just outside of town. You know, steak and ribs and whatnot. They’re celebrating national heifer week or something and a friend of mine who runs a health-food store made up some of the salads. I mean, I’m not that much into red meat, but I thought it might be fun.”

  “Sure,” I said, marveling at how easy it was. “Sure, sounds like fun.”

  She was smiling like all the angels in heaven. “Great,” she said. “Let me just take off this smock and get my purse,” and she started out of the room, only to swing round at the doorway and lean into the post for a moment. “Maybe you know the place? It’s on the Covelo road?”

  One of the ceramic pinheads reached out and punched me in the solar plexus but I held on, praying, gasping for breath, feeling the great hot tongs of fate fishing around for me as if I were a lobster in a pot.

  “It’s called Shirelle’s.”

  Chapter 7

  The parking lot at Shirelle’s—that barren wasteland, that tundra—was as packed with vehicles as a used-car lot. There were pickups, RVs, Mustangs, Bobcats and Impalas, choppers, dirt-bikes and Mopeds, Trans Ams and Sevilles, woodies, dune buggies, vans—and the monolithic cherry-red cab of a Peterbilt truck, a machine among toys, rising like an island from the sea of steel and chrome. Beyond the cars I could make out cowboy hats and tiny sun-flamed faces and the metronomic dip and rise of the head of a grazing horse. I recognized the scene. Bingo under the trees, the church picnic, county fair. Children ran squalling through a blue-black haze of barbecue smoke, dogs yelped, Frisbees hung in the air. Over it all came the inevitable twanging thump of amplified country music—Duckett, duckett, duck-etttt/Duck, duck, duck-etttt—and the hoots and yahoos of inebriated giants in big-brimmed straw hats. I swung into the lot with a crunch of gravel and found a parking spot between two glistening, high-riding pickups. “Well,” I said, turning to Petra, “this is it, huh?”

  She was leaning forward in her seat, legs long and naked and brown, scanning the lot with the intensity of a child at the fair. “There’s Sarah’s car,” she said, “and that’s Teddy’s motorcycle.” She shot a look past me. “And good, good. Alice is here, too.” Her hand was on my arm, light as a breath of air, heavy as a shackle. “I think you’re really going to like them.”

  Odd, I thought, emerging from the car, that I’d barely noticed all this on my way into town an hour and a half ago. (I’d been aware of an unusual level of activity—cars swinging in and out of the lot, music blaring—but had been afraid to look too closely for fear I’d find myself staring into Savoy’s face, or Shirelle’s or Sapers’s or George Pete Turner’s.) Odder still that we’d taken my car—the interdicted Toyota—but I’d felt, for reasons that have to do with the masculine ego and the need to assert it, that I should be in command. Despite the fact that Petra had offered to drive and that the very sight of the Toyota was a provocation to every law enforcement officer within a thirty-mile radius.

  I slammed my door. Petra slammed hers. I stood there a moment in the hellish sun, the smell of burning meat in my nostrils, and felt as naked and exposed as a sinner at the gates of Dis. Twice before I’d trod this very ground, and twice before I’d found myself in deep trouble. The place was a sink of enmity, a nest of yahooism, as fraught with danger as the Willits police station. (Quick clips of the leering faces of Sapers, Marlon, Shirelle, Savoy and Jerpbak passed in review through the contracting lens of my consciousness.) Good God. I’d gone back on my word, left the farm wide open to discovery and paraded my car about the streets, and now here I was, strolling blithely into the lion’s den as if I had nothing to fear. What am I doing? I thought, suddenly seized with panic. Couldn’t I control my urges, get a grip on myself, act like an adult? Of course I could, yes, of course. It wasn’t too late. I’d tell Petra that I didn’t feel well, that I hated fairs, country music, sunshine, that my parents had been missionaries roasted by cannibals and that the smell of the barbecue pit turned my stomach. But then she took my hand to lead me forward, and something rose up in me that had neither regard for danger nor respect for fear, and I felt nothing but bliss.

  Admission, FOR ALL THE MEAT, BEER AND SALLID YOU CAN HOLD, was six dollars, and we stood in front of a card table manned by a rapier-nosed, watery-eyed old fellow in a plaid shirt while Petra dug through her purse and I examined the contents of my pockets. I had about fourteen or fifteen dollars to last me the rest of my life, but for the same reason I’d insisted on driving, I attempted to pay for both of us. I came up with two fives and two singles that were so worn they looked like leaf mulch, and laid them on the table, but Petra wouldn’t hear of it. “No way,” she said, scooping up the bills and forcing them into my front pocket. “I invited you, remember?”

  The old man looked confused. He stared up at us out of pale, swollen eyes, then produced a handkerchief and blew his nose carefully, tenderly, as if he were aware that each blow might be his last. “Two?” he said, his voice distant and cracked, and then held out a trembling pink hand to take the twenty Petra offered him. As he fumbled for change in the cigar box at his elbow and then carefully tore two pale orange stubs from a wheel of all-purpose tickets, I couldn’t help thinking, with shame and mortification and an odd sensation of arousal, of the makeshift desk at the suck palace and the ten sordid despairing minutes I’d given up there. I took the ticket guiltily—ADMIT ONE—and followed Petra, my guide and support, into the roped-off area that enclosed the sickly tree, the gaping dark entrance to the bar and the smoking pit.

  For the first few minutes I kept my head down, tense and wary, concentrating on bits of broken glass in the dirt, on the sharp, minatory toes of cowboy boots, on bare ankles, painted toenails and snub-nosed sneakers. Petra led me to the beer booth, where I studied the footprints in the beer-mudd
ied earth and the way the froth dissolved at the bartender’s feet. “What’ll it be, honey?” the bartender asked, twanging the verb until it fell somewhere between bee and bay.

  “Two beers,” I said, addressing his belt buckle.

  Petra laughed. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “My voice is changing.”

  I stole a glance at the guffawing bartender, expecting Lloyd Sapers or George Pete Turner, and was relieved to find myself staring into the grinning, wild-eyed, gold-toothed, sun-blasted face of a drunken stranger in a Stetson hat. “Good beer, boy,” he said, handing me two plastic cups filled to the rim. “Drink up. We got a bottomless keg here.”

  I nodded, wrenched my face into a simulated grin and gave the crowd a quick scan (the backs and profiles of strangers, naked shoulders, sunburned beer bellies, bola ties and blue jeans), and then ducked my head again, expecting the blade to fall at any moment. Then Petra said, “There’s Sarah,” and nudged me in the direction of a maze of tables heaped with food.

  Sarah was tall, broad-shouldered and bosomy, dressed in Dan-skin top and jeans, her hair teased straight out from her head until it looked like one of those furry hats worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace. She sat at a long table behind a sign advertising her health-food store—THE SEEDS OF LIFE—and served falafel, tahini, tofu salad and carrot juice as alternatives to the ceremonial slabs of bloody beef that made National Heifer Week the event that it was. She wasn’t doing much business. I took her hand as Petra introduced us, then watched as she scribbled “Out to Lunch” over the store logo and laid a sheet of plastic wrap over the tofu salad. “Everybody’s over here,” she said, and we followed her past the smoking barbecue pit (out of the corner of my eye I saw billowing smoke, vague menacing figures, the glow of hot coals) to a blanket spread out in the shade of the building.