T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Phil was grinning. “But I’m not dead — though I think I will be if we have to go through much more of the sort of bullshit we went through today.”

“So what happened?” Gesh asked.

“Oh. It was simple. The guy on the bulldozer saw what was happening, steamed up the hill like he was coming off the starting flag at Le Mans, caught me with the bucket and pushed the whole business right up the road and onto level ground. I was within about three feet and ten seconds of being crushed under Christ knows how many tons of dirt and I didn’t even really know it.”

Ice cubes rattled in our glasses (we’d been provident enough to bring up six bags of ice in a pair of plastic coolers). Wood hissed in the stove. We mulled over Phil’s story in silence for a moment before Gesh turned to me. “How about you, Felix?”

I laughed. “The closest I ever came?” I laughed again, remembering. “It’s short and sweet,” I said, “nothing like Phil’s. But it’s weird and mystical almost. Did I ever tell you about this, Phil?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It was when I was living in New York with Ronnie and we rented that summer place for two weeks — I think it was about a year after we got married. You remember the place, Phil.”

Phil took a long pull at his drink and made a face. “In Lake Peekskill, right?”

In Lake Peekskill. A bungalow that belonged to my Uncle Irv and that stank of cat shit and mold. We’d been living in the city and we had no money. Irv let us have the place cheap. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

“That’s the place,” I said. “You remember how it smelled?”

Phil nodded, Gesh leaned forward. I told the story.

There was sun the first couple of days. I set up a volleyball net, swam across the lake, charred meat on the outdoor grill. I was Mr. Country all of a sudden. Ronnie did crossword puzzles. Then the rain started. A low-pressure system that hovered over New Jersey like a judgment and gave us four solid days of thunderstorms. When the sun finally poked through again I was burning to get out — we were wasting our vacation. I asked Ronnie if she wanted to take a hike in the woods.

“The woods? Isn’t there enough woods right here to satisfy you?” We were hemmed in by maple, willow, white birch. Hummocks of unmowed grass fled from the wall of the house, ducked under a barbed-wire fence and flowed out into a field where cows were lowing. I shrugged my shoulders. What I wanted was deep woods, solitude, the pale clerestory light that filters through the trees and settles over you like an ancestral memory. Ronnie eased into a lawn chair with a tube of tanning butter, her prescription shades, a magazine and a radio. I told her I’d be back in a couple of hours.

It was August. Humid, the trees drowning in green. I drove to the state park and followed a rutted dirt road through a close dark tunnel of hardwood and pine. It was a one-lane road. There were no other cars. Eventually I reached a primitive bridge that might or might not have supported the weight of the car. Afraid to chance it, I backed off the road as far as I could and stepped out to have a look at the stream rushing under the bridge.

The stream was high and roiled, swollen with runoff from the previous days’ storms, hurling debris over its banks, slamming at the base of the bridge as if it would annihilate it. I don’t know what I was thinking of — I was a city dweller, and I’d never been out in the woods alone in my life. Perhaps it was some recollection of Boy Scout camp or the cabin my parents had rented when I was younger, or perhaps it was simply an instinctual need to experience nature in some primary, unsanitized way — at any rate, I decided to follow the stream into the green tangle that swallowed it up.

If I had vague stirrings of the excitement that must have infected a Hilary or a Cabeza de Vaca, they were quelled almost instantly — others had been here before me. With a vengeance. They’d guzzled beer, blasted shotguns, changed babies, gobbled tortilla chips and carved their names in tree trunks. As I went on, though, following a rough path that dodged in and out of the tumble of rocks bordering the streambed, the signs of civilization began to disappear. There was still the occasional Schlitz can or shell casing, but I began to get the impression that I’d penetrated more deeply into the forest than the average day-tripper, and I felt a swelling of pride. When I came across a natural pool fed by a steady plunging waterfall, I settled down on a rock and ate the Hershey bar I’d brought along, careful to fold up the wrapper and tuck it in my pocket.

The water gulped and hissed like a dozen Jacuzzis, birds whistled in the branches, sunlight broke through the treetops to fracture the surface of the pool. I felt at peace, in tune with things, I felt like Huck Finn, Nick Adams. There were no serpents in the forest, there was no poison ivy, nothing to bite or sting or discourage. Why hadn’t I done this more often? I thought, munching candy. This was great, this was exhilarating, this was nature.

It was at that moment that a thunderous, splintering crack sounded behind me and I was suddenly raked along the right side of my body and swept aside as if I were nothing, a dustball, a speck of dander; then there was a booming crash and an explosion of water that soaked me through. A tree had fallen. My arm was scraped raw, my clothes were wet, there was bark and sawdust in my hair, ants scrambling down the back of my neck. The base of the tree lay beside me, as big around as the Washington Monument; the far end of it was sunk into the pool at my feet.

I’d told the story before. It was at this point in the recitation that I looked up and held my audience’s eyes, the old loon with his hand on the wedding guest’s arm: “If I’d been sitting twelve inches to the right, I would have been crushed.”

Gesh whistled. “That’s some story.”

“CITY MAN HEARS TREE FALLING IN FOREST,” Phil said, quoting an imaginary headline and hooting into his gimlet.

My hand trembled as I lifted my drink from the box of canned beets that doubled as an end table. I always felt odd telling that story, no matter how I tried to make light of it. I hadn’t been crushed, I hadn’t contracted leukemia at fourteen or run my motorcycle into a fence. To remember it, to describe it, was to admit not only that I could have been crushed in any one of a thousand ways, but that inevitably I would be, as all of us would. It was a thing you didn’t think about. Maybe that’s why Gesh suggested it.

I stood abruptly and began to rifle through the bags of groceries that lined the crude kitchen counter and competed with garbage for space on the floor. Shaken, light-headed, filled with the soul-barer’s exhilarating sense of communion and absolution, I let my fingers do the thinking. Cold tin, cold aluminum. Shapes. The muffled clatter of air-tight cans. Finally I came up with a can of black olives. I borrowed Phil’s Swiss Army knife, serrated the lid and sucked back the oily dark essence of Greece — or rather the San Fernando Valley — and settled back down beside the stove.

Then it was Gesh’s turn.

He fingered the scar that split his eyebrow. “I got this in a car crash,” he said. “I was driving, shit-faced drunk. A red Triumph I borrowed from a girl I was going out with. Went through a stone wall at sixty and the thing burst into flame. Some stranger pulled me out. I was unconscious.”

He rolled up his shirt to expose a triad of short angry welts. “And this I got down in Mexico. Some shithead in a bus station said something to me in Spanish I didn’t like the sound of, so I hit him. He stabbed me three times.”

I said something weighty like “Holy shit.”

Gesh looked pleased. He liked to think of himself in heroic terms — biggest, toughest, smartest, strongest, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, eat the most Quaaludes and still stand up and wash the dishes. Raised in Echo Park and educated in abandoned clapboard houses and the alleys out back of Sunset Boulevard, he’d been through it all — gang fights, juvenile hall, doping, moping, expulsion from his high school honor society, and two years of the worst the UCLA classics department could dish out — and he never let you forget it. After a pause of suitable dramatic duration, he said, “But I’ve been closer than that, a lot closer.”