T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

There was a smell of slow rot on the air, of mold and compost. Birds mocked us from the trees. Our hands and faces were black with loam, as if we’d been buried and unearthed and buried again. Gesh tried to light a cigarette. His pants were torn at the knee and the trench coat hung from him like a wet beach towel. Phil was clowning. He bent to scoop up a handful of mud and slap it down across the crown of his head, like Stan Laurel at the conclusion of a pie-throwing skirmish. It wasn’t funny. “Okay,” Gesh growled, flinging down the wet cigarette and spreading his big hands across the indented bumper of the Toyota, “why don’t you see what you can do?”

I wiped my hands on the seat of my pants and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was musty and cold, the windows opaque with wet. I turned the key, took note of the answering roar (we’d lost the muffler apparently), and watched the wipers flail at the rain. Then I revved the engine, peeled the bark from the logs and hydroplaned up the road as far as I could go, my co-workers slogging madly behind me like refugees chasing after the Red Cross wagon. When I bogged down, the whole process started over again: heave, haul, crank, shove. Sometimes I’d manage to make a couple hundred feet; other times I’d come wheeling off the log grid and sink instantaneously in the mud. The rain was no help: it fell steadily all afternoon. And we were, as I was later to discover, climbing a vertical drop of something like six hundred feet from the blacktop road to the cabin.

Finally, after four and a half back-breaking hours, we reached a point at which the road began to level out, and when I came off the launching pad for what must have been the twentieth time, I kept going. The car fishtailed right and left, low-hanging branches swooped at the windshield, the cheers of my partners faded in the background, and I kept going. There was a short straightaway, a series of S curves and then a wide sweeping loop that brought me up into a rain-screened clearing about the size and shape of a Little League field. I didn’t know where I was going, slashing through swaths of waist-high weed and thumping over frame-rattling boulders and mounds of rusted machine parts, hooked on the idea of momentum …

Until I saw the cabin.

No, I thought, no, this can’t be it, as I slammed on the brakes and skidded into a heap of scrap metal that featured a rusted boxspring and the exoskeleton of the first washing machine ever made. I’d experienced hiatuses between expectation and actuality before — who hasn’t? But this was staggering. Hunting lodge? The place was an extended shack, the yard strewn with refuse, the doorway gaping like an open mouth, like the hungry maw of the demon-god of abandoned houses demanding propitiation. Someone — Vogelsang, no doubt — had nailed tarpaper up on the outer walls in place of shingles, and there was a ridiculous white cloud of sheet Styrofoam lashed across the roof (in the hope of forestalling leaks, as I was later to learn). One thing I was sure of, even then, sitting stunned behind the fractured windshield of the stalled Toyota: no one had lived in the place for twenty years. Or more.

Inside, it was worse. The roof leaked in eight places, the front door had blown in and torn back from its hinges, a furious collision of sumac and vetch darkened the windows. I dropped my duffel bag on the cracked linoleum floor (a floral pattern popular in the forties), and walked round the main room as if I were touring a museum. The room was L-shaped, roughly divided into kitchen and parlor. I paused over the.22 holes in the kitchen wall, the gas-powered refrigerator that had been nonfunctional for thirty years, the sink stained with the refuse of forgotten meals. There were two small bedrooms off the parlor, and a crude staircase that led to a third in the attic. The kitchen door gave onto a partially enclosed porch that connected with a dilapidated storage shed. Beyond the storage shed, a rust-pitted propane tank (Pro-Flame) and a grim, tree-choked ravine. I took all this in, shivering, and then turned to the stove.

There were two stoves, actually. One was a range — combination gas and wood, circa 1935—and the other was a squat wood stove made of cast iron. There was no wood. All the clothes I owned were soaked through, my shoulders had begun to quake involuntarily, I was exhaling clouds. Something had to be done. Beyond the brown windows lay 390 acres of pine, hardwood and scrub, every stick of it wet as a sponge. I pictured myself back out in that dripping tangle, snapping off branches and peeling back strips of sodden bark, and dissolved the image as abruptly as I might have switched channels on the TV. Then I thought of the storage room, and slammed through the kitchen door in a rush, inadvertently flushing a bird that had been roosting in the porch beams. It flew up in my face like a bad dream, and then it was gone.

The storage room was penumbral, cluttered with refuse. There were bundles of yellowed newspaper (TRUMAN CALLS FOR FAIR DEAL; DIMAGGIO UNRAVELS SOX), staved-in gasoline cans and remnants of what might once have been a hand loom. I stepped into the low-ceilinged room as I might have stepped into Pharaoh’s tomb, treading carefully, keeping an eye out for lucre — or rather, in this case, the merest splinter of anything combustible — among the heaps of rags, cans and bottles that flowed across the floor and slapped at the walls like the spillage of some diluvian tide. Dust lay over everything, white as pulverized bone. When I snapped a chair leg across my knee, a pair of sleek dark forms shot through the jagged window on the near side of the room. Rats, I thought absently — or maybe ground squirrels. Five minutes later I had a respectable pile of furniture fragments and odd pieces of lumber. I set it atop a bundle of mildewed newspaper, hauled the whole mess back into the main room, checked the flue on the stovepipe, and realized I didn’t have any matches.

This was too much. I cursed. Kicked something. And then threw myself down on the stinking sun-faded sofa opposite the cold stove. Dust rose in a mighty swirling mushroom cloud and settled on my wet jacket. For a while I just sat there shivering, listening to the rain percolate through the ceiling and spatter the ancient linoleum, the storm laying down a screen of static outside. Then I heard the laboring engine of Phil’s pickup, churning its way up the mountain. They were in for a surprise, I thought, lifting myself from the sofa and gazing out through the open door at the raked and rugged hills, the trees like claws, the gray distance that couldn’t begin to suggest the gaps between ridges.

Impatient, jittery, wet to the bone, I paced the room half a dozen times and then thought of looking over the bedrooms again, with an eye to staking a claim on one of them. The nearest was unremarkable: four walls, crudely done (some misguided soul had attempted to put up slabs of sheetrock and had given up halfway through the job), a torn mattress set atop a boxspring, a broom handle nailed diagonally across the far corner to serve as a clothing rack. I moved past it, down the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom, and then into the back bedroom. It was as spare and Essene as the first. The walls were pine slats, there was a boxspring propped up on wooden packing crates, an unfinished window looked out on the trees. At first I almost missed the calendar nailed to the inside of the door. But the door swung to on uneven hinges, and when I turned, it was staring me in the face.

A calendar. I could hear the pickup rattling into the yard, the engine wheezing like a miler’s lungs. The picture over the month-and-date portion of the calendar featured a woman in a cloche hat, her face averted, skirt pinched to reveal her legs — a dull, brownish, Norman Rockwell sort of thing. But it wasn’t the picture that caught my eye. It was the year—1949, the year I was born. Odd, I thought, and then I noticed the month. November. My month. I could feel the blood rushing to my stomach, as if I’d been hit in the midsection, the impossible, nagging cosmic joke of it, the heavy black pencil strokes an act of the will, irrefutable, closing in on the very day. My day. My birthday. Circled in black.