Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  He mumbled something about a weird coincidence. I asked him to read me something, anything, pick a day. How about this date in ’65, I said. I’m upset, I said. Help me. Read me something. Be late for work.

  There was something wrong. His voice was strange, and for an instant I thought I’d somehow got the wrong number. “Dwight?” I said.

  “It’s a weird coincidence.” He was repeating himself. “I mean that you guys …”

  I couldn’t hear him. He was speaking so softly I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “Dwight,” I shouted, “I can’t hear you. What’s the matter?”

  “The fire,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “But we’re all right. We made it. I’m picking up Phil tomorrow.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Read me something.”

  “I can’t. I’m talking about my fire, in the apartment. My old apartment.”

  It was then that I began to understand, then that I slipped out of myself for a moment, then that I shut up and listened. Dwight’s building had gone up while he was at work. Two weeks ago. He’d lost everything, every record he’d ever kept, every note, every figure, every last fragment of the past. It was as if he’d never lived. “I can’t believe it,” I said.

  “Believe it.” His voice was choked. bewildered. “I’ve been trying to remember,” he said. “For two weeks I haven’t been in to work—all I’m doing is trying to reconstruct it all, trying to get something down on paper anyway.”

  I looked out at the night through the streaked grid of the booth’s window—Al & Jolene, Suck This, Go Wolverines—and saw the nodding head of the all-night clerk in the frantically lit quick-stop store. Open all night. Got everything you want. Milk, razor blades, whiskey, Kaopectate. It was a clean, well-lighted place.

  “Remember Mrs. Gold? Third grade? It was me, Bobbie Bartro and Linda Lurlee in the far row up against the map of the Fertile Crescent, remember? And you sat where—two rows over, right? Behind Wayne Moore. But what I can’t remember is where Phil sat … or the name of the girl with the braids and buck teeth—Nancy something—that moved away in the fifth grade.”

  His voice was a plaint, a drone, remembrance of things past and funeral oration wrapped in one: I didn’t want to hear it. “Dwight,” I said. “Dwight.”

  “I’m getting senile. Really, I mean it. Like that game in Little League when we were twelve—we were the Condors, remember? We were playing the Crows, or was it the Orioles? Anyway, Murray Praeger got knocked unconscious in a rundown with somebody, remember? I can get that much. But it’s incredible. I’m really losing my grip: I can’t remember whether we won or lost—”

  “Dwight,” I said. And then I hung up.

  I felt as if someone had taken a vegetable peeler to my nerves. Hands wrapped in gauze, face smudged, clothes in a bum’s disarray, I stood there in the phone booth like a postulant, staring at the inert receiver as if I expected it to come alive, as if I somehow expected Dwight to call back and tell me he’d only been joking. After a while a pickup truck wheeled into the lot and two men in long-billed caps and coveralls emerged and ambled into the store, where the somnolent clerk served them coffee in paper cups. It wasn’t getting any earlier.

  I fell into the Toyota like a dead man, animated the engine, flicked on the lights. Exhaust rose through the floorboards, the truncated tailpipe rattled furiously against the rear bumper. Three pale faces stared out at me from the blazing sanctuary of the quick-stop store as I backed around, slammed the car into gear and shot out onto the highway with a squalling blast. Suddenly I felt crazy, fey, psychopathic. Come and get me, Jerpbak, I thought, popping the clutch and fishtailing up the road. I got it up to seventy by the time I reached the town limits, then swung around and roared through the sleepy hamlet again. I was baiting the Fates, measuring the gape of the jaws. Nothing happened.

  I found after a while that I’d somehow turned off the main drag, negotiated a tricky series of cross streets and emerged on the broad, tree-lined corridor of Oak Street. Now I was creeping, the exhaust a muted rumble. My hands were on the wheel, my foot on the accelerator, but the car rolled forward under its own volition, no arguing with destiny. Houses drifted past, white shutters, picket fences, shade trees, then a block of storefronts. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. Red-veined and sorrowful, the eyes fell back into my skull like open sores. I swiped at a black smear on my nose, tried to pat my hair in place. The headlights were tentacles pulling me along.

  The shop was dark. I found the stairway out back. White railing, ghostly. Potted plants, leaves black and smooth to the touch, lovesick cat off in the bushes, smell of rosemary or basil. I stumbled on the first step, floundering in the darkness like a dog-paddler gone off the deep end; something crashed to the ground with a sick thump. I kept going. I didn’t think, didn’t want to think.

  A moment later I stood on the second-floor landing, breathing hard and peering off into the abyss below. More plants. I turned to the door, knuckles poised, not thinking, not thinking, and made sudden cranial contact with what must have been a bowling ball suspended at eye level. It hit me once, hard, just above the bridge of the nose, then swung off into space to come back and crack me again, this time on the crown of my bowed head. All at once I felt desperate. I’d meant to knock deferentially—it was past five in the morning, after all—or at least wittily, but I found myself hammering at the door like the Gestapo. Boom, boom, boom.

  From inside I could hear confused movement: shuffling feet, probing hands. A light went on, a voice called out. Boom, boom, boom, I hammered. Then the porch light, mustard yellow. A hanging planter materialized, reeling past my left ear; a ceramic dwarf looked up at me quizzically. “Okay, okay,” came the voice from within, “enough already.” I stopped pounding. There was the sound of lock and key, a bolt sliding back.

  I spread my bandaged hands, lifted my shoulders in a deprecatory shrug: I was ready to capitulate.

  Chapter 3

  Petra stood in the doorway, her face soft with sleep, a dragon-splashed kimono pinched round her throat. There was a look of utter stupefaction in her eyes, a look of bewilderment and incomprehension, as if she’d been wakened from a sound sleep and asked to name the fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics or the capitals of all the countries of the South China Sea, beginning with Borneo. A square-headed cat brushed up against her bare ankles and then froze, blinking up at me mistrustfully.

  I’d twisted my face into a strained grin and fixed it there until I must have looked like a funeral-home director in a novelty shop. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say, I grinned wider.

  “Felix?” she said. It was a question.

  I nodded.

  This exchange was succeeded by an ever-lengthening moment of silence, during which I struggled to think of some witty opener, the mot that would break the ice and precipitate a mutual flood of verbal good will, while Petra’s look went from puzzlement to a glare of irate recognition. She was studying my sorry hair, soiled face, scorched clothes and mummy-wrapped hands, recalling no doubt that the last time she’d laid eyes on me my behavior had been eccentric to the point of offense, and that our only communication since had been my mad, interminable, demanding, love-struck letters, the tone of which made Notes from Underground seem the tranquil recollections of a lucid mind. Behind her I could see buffed linoleum, a ceramic pig devouring ceramic corn, more plants. “I’m sorry,” I began, staring down at my feet and losing my train of thought: a ragged hole the size of a silver dollar had eaten through the canvas of my right sneaker, dissolving the sweatsock beneath and exposing the serried rank of my upper toe joints. Stiff, naked, red, the toes looked as if they should be cracked and dipped in drawn butter.

  The cat nuzzled Petra’s ankles. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the oscillating planter had begun to lose momentum, winding down like a hypnotist’s watch. In the space of time I’d been standing on her doorstep groping for words, a legion of tired old men had breathed their
last, interest had accrued, vows been exchanged, and the worldwide army of hollow-eyed widows had brewed enough tea to fill all the petroleum storage tanks in Houston. Finally Petra stepped back and held the door open. “My God,” she said, “what was it—a car crash?”

  I told her everything.

  We sat at the kitchen table amid a welter of corn plants, rubber plants, dracaena, coleus and African violets, sipping Postum and watching the night sky fall away to tatters in the east, while I told her about the model hole, about the bear, about the half million that had gone through more permutations than the federal arts budget. I told her about Gesh, Phil, Vogelsang, Sapers, Marlon, about the rain, the heat, the rattlesnakes, airplanes, poison oak. I told her about the fire.

  The sky was pale, the trees beyond the windows brightening as if a filter had been lifted, when I closed out my apologia with the harrowing tale of the hospital and Jerpbak’s latest victims. “I threw his keys in the woods,” I said, my voice lifting with the memory of it.

  Petra got up from the table and put the kettle on again. “More Postum?”

  Postum. It tasted like boiled cinders. “Sure,” I said.

  I’d been talking for over an hour. I’d begun hesitantly, guiltily, alluding obliquely to my conduct at the heifer festival and then staring down at the spectacle of my clasped hands. “I’ve been keeping something from you,” I said. If she’d looked angry, tired, sympathetic and apprehensive by degrees as she’d opened the door, let me in and offered me a seat, now she gave me a look of concentrated attention: the enigma was about to be unraveled. Yes, I’d insulted her friends, deserted her on our first and only date, plagued her with rambling letters and appeared on her doorstep at five in the morning—but there were extenuating circumstances. I was a nice guy—trustworthy, loyal, sane and sympathetic—really, I was. “We’re not up here for our health,” I said.

  Her laugh surprised me. She reached out to pat my bandaged hand. “I can see that,” she said.

  I acknowledged her point with a tight, rueful smile, then lowered my head again. “We’re growing pot.”

  Petra had looked at me curiously, as if in that moment I’d emerged from darkness to light, as if I’d molted, sloughed off a strange skin and metamorphosed into the familiar. “So that’s it,” she said, smiling a wide, beautiful, close-lipped smile. “I should have guessed. And I thought you were schizophrenic or something. Or married.” She was watching me over the rim of her cup, her eyes flaring with amusement. “Remember Teddy? And Sarah?” I nodded. I wanted to get it over with, give her all the sorry details, I wanted to justify myself, I wanted absolution. “They’ve got a patch too. So does Alice.” She gestured at the dark windowpane. “I’ve even got five plants myself, buried out there in a clump of pampas grass. Everybody grows around here—it’s no big thing.”

  This was my moment of confession, yes, my moment of humiliation, my scourging—but she’d gone too far. Did she think I was some piker, some weekend dirtbagger, some Teddy? “I’m talking two thousand plants.”

  She shrugged. “Alice knows a guy up in Humboldt with twice that. He’s got his own twin-engine plane. He even contributed to the sheriff’s reelection fund last year.”

  What could I say? We were losers, schmucks, first-class bone-heads. We weren’t paying off politicians or reconnoitering the skies—we were too busy dodging our own shadows and setting fire to storage sheds. Chastened, I dropped any pretense of coming on like the macho dope king and gave her the story straight. I described rampant paranoia, xenophobia, self-enforced isolation. I told her of sleepless nights, panic at the first sputter of an internal-combustion engine, suspicion that ate like acid at the fabric of quotidian existence. I told her how Vogelsang appeared and disappeared like a wood sprite, how Phil slept with his sneakers on, how Dowst would insist that we change the hundred-dollar bills he gave us for supplies before we bought groceries, on the theory that only dope farmers would flash a hundred-dollar bill in the checkout line. She was laughing. So was I. It was a comedy, this tale I was telling her, slapstick. We were ridiculous, we were cranks, sots, quixotic dreamers—Ponce de LeéoAn, Percival Lowell and Donald Duck all rolled in one. When I’d told her everything—the whole sad laughable tale—she’d said “Poor Felix,” and patted my hand again. Then she’d asked if I wanted more Postum.

  Now, as I watched her at the stove, the first splash of sun ripening the window and firing the kimono with color, I felt at peace for the first time in months. Annealed by the fire, shriven by confession, I rolled the cup in my clumsy hands and felt like Saint Anthony emerging from the tomb. I’d revealed my festering secret and nothing had happened. Petra hadn’t run howling from the room or telephoned the police, the DEA hadn’t burst in and demanded my surrender, the stars were still in their firmament and the seas lapped the shores. No big thing, she’d said. She was right. For the moment at least I’d been able to put things in perspective, separate myself from the grip of events, see the absurdity of what we’d come to. If the best stories—or the funniest, at any rate—derive from suffering recollected in tranquility then this was hilarious. In telling it, I’d defused it, neutralized the misery through retrospection, made light of the woe. My trip to Belize? Oh, yes, I lost eight layers of skin to sunburn while snorkeling off the barrier reef, turned yellow from jaundice, got mugged outside the courthouse and couldn’t get a grip on my bowels for a month. Ha-ha-ha.

  Petra’s kimono was slit to mid-thigh. Her skin was dark, even, smooth as the slap of a masseuse’s palm. I felt deeply appreciative of that revelation of skin, that sweet tapering triangle of flesh, and was fully lost in its contemplation when she turned to me and asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t. She was standing there in the nimbus of light, looking at me as if I were the UNICEF poster child. “You know what,” she said finally, two cups of fresh noxious Postum steaming in her hand, “you’re a real mess.” I liked the tone of this observation, liked, her concern. After all, I hadn’t come to her doorstep looking for indifference, abuse or rejection, but for sympathy. Sympathy, and perhaps even a little tenderness. I lifted my eyebrows and shrugged.

  Her voice dropped. “You may as well spend the night,” she said. “Or the morning, I mean.”

  If I’d been feeling the effects of my cathartic night, feeling leaden and listless, suddenly I was alert as a bloodhound at dinnertime. My first impulse was to decline the invitation ("You don’t have to do that; oh, no, no, I couldn’t"), but I suppressed it. “I’d like that,” I said. I looked her in the eye as she set the ceramic mug down before me—the mug was implausibly ringed by what seemed to be the raised figures of dancing nymphs and satyrs—and added, “That would be great. Really. You wouldn’t believe how depressing the farm is. Especially now.”

  I was playing for sympathy, trying to gauge her mood. Was she asking me to spend the night in the way a Sister of Mercy might ask an invalid in out of the cold, or was she asking me to share her bed, clutch her, embrace her, make love to her like a genius? Out of uncertainty, out of nervousness, I began to rattle on about conditions at the summer camp—the stink of burned garbage and raw excrement, the dance of the rats and spiders, the humorless air, slashing sun, filthy mattresses and reluctant water taps—when she cut me off. “You’ll want a shower,” she said.

  “Yes, yes,” I agreed, nodding vigorously, “a shower.”

  I was standing suddenly, watching her closely, fumbling toward the first move, a touch, a kiss, never certain, suspended in the moment like an insect caught in a web. She stood three feet from me. Morning light, ceramic pig, a stove that shone like the flank of a Viking rocket. She sipped her Postum, watching me in turn, her lips pursed to blow the steam from her cup. Now, I thought, hesitating.

  “The shower’s through here,” she said, setting down her mug and drifting through the kitchen in a liquid rush of dragons and lotus flowers. The living room was on the left, her bedroom on the right. She stood at the door of the penumbral bedroom—bed, dresser, patchwork quilt—ushering me forwa
rd. Dimly visible in the far corner, a clutch of ceramic figures gazed at me with stricken, sorrowful eyes that seemed to speak of lost chances and the bankruptcy of hope. I followed her through the room, past the broad variegated plain of the big double bed and the eyes of the gloomy figures. Then the bathroom door swung open, a splash of underwater light caught in the thick, beaded, sun-struck windows. “Here’s a towel,” she said, shoving terrycloth at my bandaged hands, and then I was in the bathroom, door closing, click, and she was gone.

  My pants were a trial. Fingers like blocks of cement, fumbling with the catch, the zipper. Scorched, frayed, reeking of smoke and dried sweat, the pants finally dropped to the floor. Then the rest: sneakers fit for the wastebasket, T-shirt a rag, socks and Jockey shorts smelling as if they’d been used to mop up the locker room after the big game. The tiles felt cool under my feet, the windows glowed. I was nude, in Petra’s bathroom. Though the shower awaited, I couldn’t resist poking through her medicine cabinet—take two in the morning, two in the evening and feed the rest to the ducks—and peeking into her dirty-clothes hamper. I studied her undergarments, her makeup, her artifacts and totems. I used her toothbrush. Counted her birth-control pills, took a swig of Listerine and swirled it round my mouth, found a plastic vial of what looked to be Valium, shook out two and swallowed them. Then I slid back the opaque door of the shower stall, stepped inside and took the first hissing rush of water like a bride in the ritual bath.

  One minute passed. Two. Water swirling round my feet, my head bowed to the spray, hands held high to keep the bandages dry. When the stall door slid back, I turned like a supplicant before the oracle. Petra was smiling. The kimono dropped from her and that naked interesting leg engulfed her, pulled her forward. The water beat at me, at us, purifying, cleansing, doing the work of absolution. “I thought you might need help,” she murmured, holding me. “What with your hands and all.”