T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

The hammering on the roof woke Gesh. He said he felt like shit. “Raw and unadulterated,” he added, slitting a cellophane Mandrax packet with his teeth. “How about we stop for a cup of coffee and wait till it clears?”

We watched the water heave down the windows of the Hopland Coffee Shoppe in big scalloped sheets. It was so dark it could have been dusk shading into night. Phil was soaked through — apparently the truck’s window wouldn’t roll up. “Just my luck,” he said gloomily, and asked Gesh for some pharmaceutical help. Gesh, who seemed to have an unlimited supply, slipped him three Quaaludes. I took two. For equilibrium. It was ten-thirty in the morning. We waited until the waitress stopped refilling our coffee cups, shrugged our shoulders and hunched out into the rain.

Willits, the rain-blurred sign announced some fifty minutes later, had a population of 4,120 and stood at an elevation of 1,377 feet. We passed a series of diners, motels and gas stations, Al’s Redwood Room, and a Safeway market. The town seemed contained in a single strip, stretched out along Highway 101 for the convenience of tourists intent on the redwood forests to the north. It was as bleak and barren and uninspiring as an iceberg bobbing in the Bering Sea. Gesh and I caught glimpses of it through the beating windshield wipers. “For the next nine months,” I said, a trace of retardation in my voice as a result of the drug, which shifts your system down a couple of gears into a sort of prehibernatory torpor, “this is our closest urban center.”

“Urban center,” Gesh repeated, his voice as lugubrious as a noseblow. “Shee-it.”

Fifteen miles north of Willits we were to turn off on a blacktop road, follow it past a place called Shirelle’s Bum Steer and six or seven tumbledown farms, and then up a gravel drive to a gate that opened on “five point three miles of unimproved dirt road,” to quote Vogelsang’s directions. Fine. But it was raining so hard we missed the turnoff and Phil nearly slammed into my tail end when I braked to cut a U-turn. I rattled up on the shoulder, hit the emergency flasher and ran back to confer with him.

The intensity of the rain was staggering: I felt I was carrying a sack of potatoes on my back as I jogged the twenty steps to the pickup and poked my head through the open window. Rain tore at the back of my neck and sent exploratory tributaries down the collar of my jacket. A lone logging truck hissed up the highway, spewing water, and vanished in the haze. “What’s the story?” Phil mumbled, each word played out on a string like a yo-yo winding down. The sagging pompadour was flattened across his forehead and a drop of water depended from his nose.

“Vogelsang said fifteen miles from Willits. I read fifteen and a half on my odometer. The road we just passed must be it.”

Phil was shivering. The iris of his wild eye looked like an ice crystal in a cocktail glass. “Christ,” he moaned, “I hope so. All’s I want to do now is sit in front of the fire and crash for a couple hours.”

Shirelle’s Bum Steer greeted us like a shout of affirmation as we lurched across the highway and onto the presumptive road. I could hear Phil honking his joy behind me as we sped past the place — a ramshackle country bar attached to a house in need of paint. A pair of mud-streaked pickups huddled beneath the drooling oak out front, the hand-lettered sign was pitched at a drunken angle, and a single sad Coors neon glowed in the window like a candle at the shrine of a martyr. I took it in at a glance, noting bleakly that this was our nearest outpost of civilization. “The Land of the Rednecks,” Gesh muttered, and added that he felt like Lewis of Lewis and Clark, or maybe it was Clark, and then we were rattling over a raging tributary of the Eel River (in summer it would subside to a series of fetid, mosquito-breeding pools) and threading our way up a valley between cropped, long-faced hills that bristled with pine like so many unshaven cheeks. We were counting off tumbledown farms and scouring the left-hand side of the road for a block of stone that protruded from the ground like an admonitory finger — our indication to swing into the next road to our right — when Gesh shouted “Eureka!” and I cut hard into a dirt road that was co-incidentally the brown rippling bed of a stream.

Suddenly we were going uphill — climbing a precipice — the tires groping for purchase, water slashing at the fenders, the engine cranking with a propulsive whine and carrying us fifty or sixty feet in a headlong rush before the wheels sank to the hubcaps in a sea of reddish mud. Phil, loaded down with the barbed wire and Kawasakis, was able to develop better traction, and careened wildly up the hill and into the back of the stalled Toyota. I don’t recall the sound effects, whether there was a crunch, a shriek or a thud. But my head flew forward as if on an urgent journey of its own, the windshield groaned and then flowered in silver filigree, and the trunk latch popped open, forever. I looked at Gesh. He was cursing, and there was blood on his forearm.

Then we were all out in the downpour, ankle-deep in mud and roiling water. Trees loomed over us like cupped black hands, the rain lashed our faces with a thousand stings, I rubbed my forehead and discovered that an object the size and consistency of a golf ball had been inserted beneath the skin in the vicinity of my left eyebrow. For a moment we just stood there, hunched like lost souls awaiting the ferry across the river of lamentation, cursing softly. Then Gesh plunged into the undergrowth like an enraged bull, tearing at ferns and briars and poison oak, knocking down saplings, uprooting stumps. I thought he’d gone mad.

Meanwhile, Phil had begun to dance around the road, wringing his hands and rotating his head as if he were trying out an esoteric new routine for Alvin Ailey. “Hey, I didn’t know—“ he began, but I waved him off. “I’m okay,” I said, noting at the same time and with the dispassion of a man in a movie theater watching the Lusitania go down, that my duffel bag had been thrown from the trunk and into the center of the streambed. The heavy khaki cloth had gone dark with wet, and debris had already begun to collect against it. Inside were my shirts, my socks, my underwear, my sweaters. I took hold of the dripping strap and jerked the bag up out of the mud, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process. Phil helped me heave the sodden thing back into the trunk, and together we managed to secure the ruptured latch with a piece of wire.

Suddenly Gesh emerged from the woods, his face cross-hatched with welts and contusions, the trench coat flapping about his knees. He was dragging a downed tree the size of a battering ram. For a moment we just stood there gaping at him, our hands at our sides, rain crashing through the trees, mud swirling at our feet. It was as if we’d just been wakened from a dream of sleeping. “Christ ass,” Gesh shouted, “give me a hand, will you?”

I could feel the drug loosen its grip — think of a crouton drawn from a pot of fondue — and then I was at Gesh’s side, jerking furiously at the wet, moss-covered log. Phil fell in beside me, and we maneuvered the thing alongside the car, then staggered into the undergrowth for another. We worked silently, grunting at one another, each locked in his own thoughts (I was thinking of hot showers, hot soup, electric blankets and thermal underwear). Everything dripped, thorns raked at our wrists and faces, sowbugs crept up our arms, rain hissed in the branches like a stadium packed with disgruntled fans. As Phil and I wrestled with a half-petrified log, Gesh jacked the Toyota out of the mud. “All right, push!” he exhorted, the jack at its apogee, and the three of us leaned into the fender and then jumped back as the car slammed down on the makeshift platform with a percussive splintering crack. Then we jacked up the other side.