T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Gesh’s voice had quavered. He sat in silence for a moment, running the tip of his tongue over his upper lip and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “They didn’t even have the radio on,” he said, waving his palm in frustration, “they didn’t even know I was out there. Luck is all it was. Blind luck. I came on board naked, racked with shivers, two miles off Palos Verdes in the most shark-infested waters on the southern coast. One of the men aboard is a doctor. He tells me I’m suffering from hypothermia and makes me get into this down jacket, wraps me in blankets and gives me hot pea soup. Which I hate.

“When we get back, Denise is waiting on the pier along with a bunch of news reporters and guys in Coast Guard uniform. She’s barefoot, still in her bathing suit, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. I don’t know what came over me — I should have been filled with joy, right, glad to be alive and all that — but when I saw her there looking like the distraught heroine I just thought, You stupid bitch. You worthless piece of shit. Somebody was snapping pictures, flashbulbs bursting, she was running down the planks with her arms outstretched like it was the end of a movie or something, and I just couldn’t take it. I gave her a stiff arm like Earl Campbell — caught her right in the breastbone — and sent her sprawling over the edge of the dock, ten feet down, into the blackness. There was a scream and a splash, and suddenly everybody cleared a path for me.”

That was it. Finis. Gesh sat there, big and rumpled, something like a smile of satisfaction tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t believe it,” Phil said. “You really pushed her in?”

Gesh looked as self-righteous as a fundamentalist at a book burning. He drained his glass and flashed us a grin. “Bet your ass I did.”

Phil started it, with a snicker that gave way to a bray. Then I joined in, counterpoint, and finally Gesh, three-part harmony. We were drunk. We were alive. And for the second time that day, we were laughing. We laughed impetuously, immoderately, irreverently, wiping tears from our eyes. Late into the night.

“All right. You won’t actually need to know about this for another two weeks or so, but you may as well get an idea right now.” Dowst leaned on the haft of his shovel, patting at his face with a red bandanna. Behind him, banks of mist obscured a sick pale sun, light spread across the horizon like putty. At his feet, a hole. Raw yellow earth, gouged out like a boil or canker sore. “You want to go down about two, two and a half feet, and make it wide around as a garbage can lid.” Suddenly he was grunting or wheezing in the oddest way, like a horse with a progressive lung disease. It took me a minute before I realized what it was: he was laughing. “Or a”—he wheezed again—“or a big cut-glass punchbowl.”

It was a joke. Phil, Gesh and I glanced at one another. Ha-ha.

We were standing over the hole, our breath steaming in the cold damp air, watching Dowst like Botany 101 students on a field trip. It was seven a.m. Gesh was wearing a black turtleneck maculated with grease stains (the result of a breakfast mishap), Phil was hunched in the carapace of a paint-spattered K-Mart sweatshirt, and I was sporting one of the flannel shirts I’d bought for the country, now torn and dirtied beyond recognition. Dowst was wearing eighty-dollar hiking boots, pressed jeans and the yellow rain slicker he’d had on the night I met him. “This,” he said finally, “is the model hole. Once you get the fences up you’re going to have to dig two thousand of them.”

Gesh had a cold. He dredged the mucus from his throat and spat noisily. “While you’re sitting on your ass in Sausalito, right?”

“No, no, no, no, no — I’ll be right here the next three or four days at least, working side by side with you. We’ve got to get those fences up and start the seedlings before we get too far behind schedule.”

“And Vogelsang?”

Dowst tucked the bandanna in his pocket and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “He said he’d be up tomorrow.”

“Shit.” Gesh focused on a fist-sized stone and hammered it against the side of the house with a vicious swipe of his boot. “That’s what he said a week and a half ago.”

Dowst had showed up at dusk the previous evening — eight days after the appointed time. For a week and a half we’d been on our own, isolated, bewildered, putting in twelve-hour days with the come-along and then collapsing on our soiled mattresses at night. Once the initial hillside had been fenced (we called it the Khyber Pass in tribute to its vertiginous goat-walks and sheer declivities), we erected a greenhouse to specifications Dowst had given us in Bolinas. It was a joy compared to fencing. I took charge, relieved to be doing something I was familiar with, and we threw up the framework in an afternoon. Then we nailed Visquine — clear sheets of plastic — over the waterlogged studs and painted the whole thing green, khaki and dirt brown: army camouflage. “I feel like we’re going to war,” Phil said over the hiss of his spray can. His right hand and the sleeve of the jacket from which it protruded were a slick uniform jungle green, owing to a sudden wind shift. Gesh stood beside him, his arm rotating in a great whirling arc, spewing paint like smoke. His jaw was set, he was squinting against the fading light. “Damn straight,” he grunted.

Then we began to get itchy. Neither Dowst nor Vogelsang had showed up and we had no further instructions. And yet Dowst had repeatedly impressed upon us the vital necessity of keeping on schedule. The plants had to attain their optimum growth by September 22, when the photoperiod began to decrease. Once the daily quotient of sunlight was superseded by a greater period of darkness, the plants automatically began to bud — it was built into their genes — and that was that. The later you got your seedlings into the ground, the smaller your plants would be when the autumnal equinox rolled around — and the smaller the plants, the smaller the harvest. You didn’t have to be a botanist to appreciate how all this smallness would relate to net profit.

“So what do we do?” I asked. We were inside now, sipping at the evening’s first cocktail. We’d just driven the final nail into the greenhouse, the moon was up and the birds were crouched in the trees, grumbling like revolutionaries. “Just sit around?”

Gesh was in the kitchen, rattling pans and slamming drawers. “Mr. Yale is fucking up on us already,” he said, swinging round and slapping a blackened pot of ravioli on the table. “How could we ever be so stupid as to trust somebody with a name like Boyd Dowst?”

We’d put in a tough day in damp, forty-degree weather. The fire was warm, the smell of food distracted us, canned ravioli, boiled potatoes and pale yellow wax beans had appeared on our plates. There was coffee, orange juice and something that resembled a foot-square brownie. Outside, the hiss of wind and a spatter of rain. We ate in silence, our eyes gone soft with the first chemical rush of hunger gratified, facial muscles swelling and contracting, saliva flowing, throats clenching and stomachs revolving in mindless subjection to the alimentary imperative: chew, swallow, digest. I listened to the scrape of utensils on the tin plates, glanced at our beards, our tattered clothes, the ramshackle roof that sagged over us, and thought how apt Phil’s military metaphor had been — we were like irregulars, some cadre of the People’s Army holding the line in a remote outpost, guerrillas taking refuge in the mountains. Of course the metaphor had its limits — we were capitalist guerrillas, after all.

“We could use a day off,” Phil said after a while. “We can’t do anything without Dowst and Vogelsang. I mean, what do we know about plants anyway? Christ, I never even had a wandering Jew.”