T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Phil got the long one. “Flip you for seconds,” Gesh said, the coin already gleaming feebly in the dull glow of the lantern. “Tails,” I said, and lost.

Phil ran the water till it went cold. Then he shrugged out of his clothes, flung them in a silty heap beneath the sink — where they would undergo a gradual petrifaction as the weeks dragged by — and eased into the tub, moaning like a man in the throes of the consummate orgasm.

We watched from the doorway. “Five minutes,” I shouted, checking my Benrus.

By the time my turn came round, the water was tepid, and the color and texture of the Mississippi in flood. No matter. This was real dirt I was covered with — stinking, fermenting, wild-woods dirt — and there would be no peace, no sweet surcease from care, until I got it off me. Besides, I reflected as I lowered myself into the soup, as last man to bathe I could linger as long as I liked.

I didn’t. The water went cold almost immediately and the tap water was colder still. I lathered up, rinsed off, patted myself with a wet towel and made for the back bedroom, the ominous calendar and my damp sleeping bag. I was beat, every joint rubbed raw. Rain lashed at the roof, tiny feet scratched in the corners. I slept like a zombie.

We were awakened by a thunderous pounding at the door — Anne Frank’s moment of truth, the men in the black boots come to drag us away. The sound reverberated through the house, deafening, insupportable, terrifying. We’d done nothing illegal — yet. We had no pot, no seeds even. There was no reason to be alarmed, but we were alarmed. No, not simply alarmed — panicked. I rushed out into the main room in my underwear, heart slamming at my ribs, to see Phil’s stricken face peering from the shadows of the front bedroom. It couldn’t have been later than six-thirty or seven. “Hallo?” a voice boomed. “Is anybody in there?”

“Just a minute,” I called, dancing round the cold floorboards, my nervous system simultaneously flashing two conflicting messages: Be calm and Sauve qui peut. Phil had vanished. I could hear him thumping into his pants, coins spilling like chimes. Something crashed to the floor. “You’ll — you’ll have to go around to the other door,” I shouted, hugging my shoulders against the cold, “this one’s been …” I hesitated. “This one’s been nailed shut.”

Gesh’s head appeared at the top of the stairwell, between the rails of the crude banister one of our troglodyte predecessors had erected. “Get rid of them,” he hissed. “We can’t have fucking people—“ but he cut himself off in mid-sentence: the kitchen door had begun to rattle.

I reached the door at the same instant it was thrust open, and found myself standing toe-to-toe with the very archetype of the rural American, the living, breathing, foot-shuffling image of the characters who populate the truck stops of America, vote for neo-Nazis and mail off half their income to the 50 °Club or the Church of the Flayed Jesus. Rangy, fiftyish, he was dressed in overalls, plaid hunting jacket and a Willits Feed cap. His face was seamed like a soccer ball, a wad of tobacco distended his cheek, he reeked of cowshit and untamed perspiration. “Hallo,” he roared — he could have been greeting someone six miles away — and extended his hand. “Lloyd Sapers,” he said, still too loudly.

“I ranch the place next door?”

I shook his hand gravely, the elastic band of my Jockey shorts tearing at my flesh like masticating teeth. I was wondering both how to get rid of him and how to indicate, without arousing suspicion, that we were antisocial types who neither sought nor welcomed unannounced visits and least of all friendly relations with our neighbors, when he brushed past me and strode into the room as if he’d just assumed the mortgage on the place.

“Seen the light last night,” he said, drawing himself up and spinning round like a flamboyant prosecutor exposing the sordid and incontrovertible truth to a scandalized world, “heard you, too. Comin’ up the road. All afternoon, it seems like.” And then he laughed, way up in the back of his throat.

Somehow, things had gotten out of hand. Here I was, shivering like a wet dog and dressed only in my underwear, standing in the middle of the dirty, disused kitchen of a shack unfit for human occupation, engaged in a bantering conversation with an utter stranger, a man who by his very presence had to be considered an enemy. The discolored lump over my left eye began to throb. “Look,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, Mr. Sapers, but—”

“Call me Lloyd.”

“—but it’s early, and I—”

He burst out with a laugh so sudden and sharp it startled me. “Early, oh yeah, I’ll bet,” he shouted, and flashed me a knowing grin.

At this point, Phil appeared behind him, shuffling his feet and bobbing his head. His bad eye, I noticed, had gone crazy. Normally it was just slightly out of plumb, but under duress it began to rove as if it had a life of its own. Standing there in the gray light in his rumpled clothes, he could have been an elongated Jean-Paul Sartre contemplating a street full of merde.

Sapers swung round on him and seized his hand. “Glad to meet you. It’s a pleasure, it really is. Haven’t had nobody out here for thirty years now,” he said, “except for that bonehead that was up here last summer in his house trailer — Smith or Jones or whatever the hell his name was. He was up to no good, I’ll tell you that.” The rancher delivered this information with a sad shake of his head, then pushed his cap back with a sigh that was actually a sort of yodel, and asked if we had any coffee.

I don’t know what I was feeling at that moment — curiosity, shock, fear, annoyance. That someone else had been up here before us, and that he’d been up to no good — this was news. Who was he? Why hadn’t Vogelsang told us? And what about this nosy old loudmouth who was perched on the edge of the stove now, as comfortable as if he were counting sacks of hog manure in his own living room? We couldn’t afford to have him snooping around — or anybody else, for that matter. But how to get rid of him? Abstractedly, I watched Phil bend to the stove, stoke the embers and lay some scrapwood on top. Then I ducked out of the room to get dressed, as jittery as if I’d swallowed a handful of amphetamines.

When I slapped back into the kitchen, hoisting my pants with one hand and clutching boots and socks in the other, Phil was heating water for coffee and Sapers was rattling on about the property, the weather, his wife, hoof-and-mouth disease, Ronald Reagan, taxes, deer hunting and just about anything else that came to his fevered mind. He was like a man who’d just emerged from six months in solitary, like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, Crusoe with a captive audience: he could not shut up.

As if he’d read my thoughts, our neighbor looked up at that instant and fixed me with a gaze as steady and intense as a stalking predator’s. For an instant I saw something else in him, something raw and calculating, but then his eyes went soft, and he was the grinning bumpkin again. “Sure hope you don’t mind me going on like this, but unless I go into town I don’t have nobody much to talk to, outside of Trudy, that’s my wife, and my son Marlon. And Marlon, he’s a good boy, but he ain’t got much sense, if you know what I mean.” (I didn’t know what he meant, but in time I was to be enlightened on this score, as on a host of others. Marlon was nineteen, he weighed three hundred and twenty pounds, stood six feet tall, wore glasses that distorted his eyes until they looked like tropical fish in a hazy tank, and was so severely disturbed he’d spent the better part of his adolescence in the violent ward of the state mental hospital in Napa.)