T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

We siphoned gas from the Toyota and added a pint to the inch or two of pale liquid we discovered in the engine’s reservoir. I took my turn at the pull. Nothing. We removed the spark plug and cleaned it. We checked the belts and wires and laid our hands against the cold metal casing like faith healers. Still nothing. Gesh fiddled with the carburetor in a way that indicated he didn’t know what he was doing. Phil looked over his shoulder. I’ve never been mechanically inclined myself.

We knocked off at noon, gulped reheated coffee and swallowed Velveeta sandwiches like pills, and then went out to put up the three-strand barbed-wire fence that would keep cattle and deer out of the growing areas. As soon as we left the house, the drizzle gave way to a deluge — plastic rain-colored sheets hammered into the ground, no sky above, buckling rivulets below. My nose was running. I felt as if I hadn’t been warm — or dry — in a month. “Okay,” Phil said, bending over a roll of wire, “you grab one end, I’ll get the other.”

Stringing barbed wire involves the use of a come-along, an insidious forged-steel device that operates on the leverage principle. You bind the thing to a sturdy tree trunk, crank the wire till it’s tight enough to strum, and then affix said wire to a post or tree by means of a U-clip. It is nasty, back-breaking work. And what made it even nastier was the terrain we found ourselves confronting.

When you’re growing a contraband crop you can’t just step out the front door, plow up a field and sow seeds as if you were raising corn, pumpkins and squash. No, you’ve got to be discreet. And with discretion in mind, Dowst had suggested we plant in widely separated patches — in the midst of existing stands of vegetation — as a means of subverting aerial detection. During the dry months, he’d explained, our plants would be the only viridescent vegetation for miles, and if concentrated, they would stand out like oases in a desert. Unfortunately, the only planting area he’d selected and laid out at this point happened to be located on a hillside with a slope comparable to that of Mauna Loa. We negotiated this hillside throughout the afternoon, shredding our hands, stumbling, lurching, falling, haphazardly stapling the wire to saplings and clumps of poison oak, cursing Vogelsang, cursing Dowst, cursing ourselves. It was dark when we quit.

Gesh did the cooking. He tended his two frying pans and the big pot of steaming water on the back burner with the scrupulosity of the cuisinier at La Bourgogne. In one pan, he fried eggs; in the other, pork chops. The pot of water was eventually converted, through the miracle of modern science and the chemical wizardry of General Foods, to a steaming, plethoric mass of mashed potatoes. At the moment of truth, when all three dishes had simultaneously reached the apex of culinary perfection, Gesh inverted both frying pans over the pot of instant mashed potatoes and beat the resulting melange to a froth with a spoon the size of a Ping-Pong paddle. “Soup’s on,” he said, jabbing a serving spoon into the midst of the glutinous mess — it stood erect — and setting the pot down on the table.

After dinner, we sipped cocktails (eight-ounce vodka gimlets, very dry) and stared at the wood stove. Phil hauled out his guitar and gave us a nasal rendition of “So Much Trouble” ( My baby left me, my mule got lame,/Lost all my money in a poker game,/A windstorm came up just the other day,/Blew the house I lived in away) , and then suggested we tell jokes to while away the time. We had to do something. It got dark at six and we had no television, no stereo, no radio, no lights even. I refilled the glasses while Phil told a hoary joke about a tractor, a bloodhound and a farmer’s daughter. The response was less than enthusiastic: neither Gesh nor I could even muster a grin. “Give me a break,” Phil said. He was seated cross-legged in front of the stove. His face, neck and hands were pocked with welts, as if he were suffering from chicken pox or scarlet fever. “It’s your turn, Felix,” he said, as I handed him his drink. “Tell us a joke.”

I said I didn’t know any.

“Gesh?” Phil said.

Gesh looked first at me, then at Phil. The Coleman lantern squatted on the table behind him, and it threw his shadow over the room, enormous, jagged, looming and receding as he leaned forward to light a cigarette or set his glass down. “What’s the closest you ever came to dying?” he said.

“Me?” Phil sipped at his drink, looking like a whiz kid who’s just been handed an intriguing equation. He produced a wad of toilet paper and blew his nose thoughtfully. “I don’t know — I guess it was the time I was working construction and nearly had a dump truck fall over on me. It was weird. I was too worried about looking stupid to be scared.” He pulled back the door of the stove and chucked in the wad of toilet paper: the room flared for an instant, then the iron door fell to and the shadows sprang back to reclaim the corners.

“I was nineteen, working for minimum wage and doing construction on this golf course in Westchester — they were adding a back nine to go with the nine they already had, and we were doing everything from digging trenches for the irrigation pipe to raking up stones and seeding the fairways. Anyway, the foreman, he’s this character right out of The Untouchables or something — Italian, heavy accent, square as a wooden block — and he wants volunteers to drive these three broken-down dump trucks he’s got, hauling dirt. There’s about thirty of us there — a couple of black guys in their late twenties, early thirties, and the rest a bunch of long-haired college kids. I’d never driven a truck in my life, but when the foreman says ’Who can drive this thing?’ I raise my hand. I thought it was funny that the older guys — the black guys — never looked up from their shovels, but shit, the way I saw it, it was a hell of a lot easier to cruise around in a truck than break your ass digging ditches.”

“I can relate to that,” I said, holding up my blistered hands.

“So I get in the truck. The pedals are the size of frying pans, two feet from the floor, the steering wheel’s like an extra-large pizza or something, there’s this dumping gear I’ve never seen before.” Phil looked up at me. “You remember that summer I worked at Loch Ledge.” I nodded.

“Anyway, six guys are coming with me. Two in the cab, the rest hanging on to the outside. We’re going to pick up a load of dirt and then bring it across the property and spread it. So I get down there at the base of this big hill and there’s another truck in front of me, idling, while this guy in a caterpillar — union worker, middle-aged, making two hundred bucks a day — fills up the truck. This is great, I’m thinking. Getting paid for just sitting here.

“Then it’s my turn. He fills me up so the dirt is mounded up over the roof of the truck, stones clanking off as I grind it into gear and head up this narrow dirt road, real steep, up the side of a cliff that overlooks this little stream they dammed up for a water hazard. Halfway up, in first gear, the bands start slipping. I’m going full out, foot to the floor, and the truck is standing still — overloaded, I guess. So I hit the brake. Nothing. The engine’s screaming, the truck is sliding backwards and I’m totally powerless.

“That’s when the other guys abandon ship. College kids, like me. Stupid, crater-faced, do-or-die types. They leap off the sides, open the door and jump. I don’t know what to do, don’t even think about it. All I know is the foreman’ll eat me for breakfast if I wreck the truck, so I just hang on, foot to the floor, bands slipping, the truck inching backwards. I was dead, from stupidity, from not knowing that I could die, from not even considering flinging open the door and jumping.”