T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“That doesn’t matter,” I said.

“No? What are we supposed to do then — fence in the whole three hundred and ninety acres? I say we take tomorrow off and just lay up and rest — or maybe go into town, see what kind of nightlife Willits has to offer.”

Gesh was shaking his head. “Uh-uh, Felix is right. Look, I’m not up here for my health — I’m going to bust my ass, tear my hair out, do everything I fucking can to make sure I see that hundred and sixty-six thousand come November — and I say we pick out another growing area on our own.”

Next morning we took the come-along and went looking.

It was a good move psychologically. We were riding the crest of accomplishment, the dreariness and hardship of the first week behind us, one area already fenced and the greenhouse erected, and now, when we had every excuse to sit back and wait for instructions, we were seizing the initiative. Here we were, men of action, hard, tough, ready for anything, off to wrest a million and a half dollars from the earth. But where to begin? There was an awful lot of territory out there: trees uncountable, rocks, slopes, sheer deadly drops, gaping gulleys, hardpan flats that mocked pick or shovel, thickets of thorn and manzanita as close and sharp as teeth. “What we need,” I said, lacing my sneakers, “is something hidden, level and not too far from the house.” We were milling around the front yard, belching softly over breakfast. “Good luck,” Phil said.

The property sloped sharply toward the dirt road that linked us (however tenuously) with the outside world, and then dropped off beyond it to the south and east. To the north was Sapers’s house, inconveniently located at the extremity of his property, no more than two hundred yards across the ravine from ours. (We couldn’t believe it — the two places combined must have been close to a thousand acres, and yet the houses were within shouting distance. Wagon-train mentality, Phil called it, his voice saturated with disgust.) To the west, the mountain we were situated on rose another two hundred vertical feet before petering out in a smooth bald crown of rock. Since we wanted southern exposure — that much we knew at least — we started down a crude ancillary road that looped away from our driveway and wound round the southern slope like a waistband.

You didn’t have to be Natty Bumppo to see that the road had been in disuse for some time. Branches had begun to close over it, saplings sprouted in the hollows dug by ancient wheels, clumps of poison oak made forays into the shoulders. There was evidence of animal life, too, most notably mounds of excrement flecked with seeds and bits of nutshell. I stopped at one point to tie my shoelace, and when I caught up with my co-workers they were bent over a glistening coil of feces that had been deposited smack in the center of the road. “Dog shit,” Gesh announced.

“There aren’t any dogs up here,” Phil said. “I bet it’s raccoon shit.”

“What about coyotes?”

“Whatever it is, it looks pretty big,” I said.

Gesh was racking his brain, mentally thumbing through the pages of some old battered Fieldbook and Guide to the Mammals of the Pacific Northwest. “Bear shit?”

We glanced around us as if an entire zoo were crouched in the bushes, eyes blazing, ears cocked, great pink tongues lapping at paws and hind ends. Then Phil straightened up, shrugged, and looked off down the road: the wonders of nature had an intense but short-lived appeal. We moved on.

Surprisingly, the road began to level out farther on down the mountain, until finally we came upon a strip that showed evidence of recent use. The faint impress of tire tracks was visible beneath a grid of weed, and here and there a bush had been lopped or a tree limb severed. Moments later we came across a garbage-strewn path that intersected the road at a forty-five-degree angle and then plunged into a thicket as dense as something you’d expect to find in the Great Dismal Swamp. “What do you make of this?” I said, hesitating.

Gesh grunted. The path was well worn, the bushes clipped back. “Jones,” he said.

Jones. Enlightenment came like a blow to the back of the head. My pulse rate accelerated. Undifferentiated fears assailed me like bats exploding from a cave.

Phil looked perplexed, as if we’d been talking in code. “Who?”

“That dipshit farmer, remember? Somebody was up here last year, he said, somebody that was up to no good. Somebody named Jones.”

“Or Smith,” I added, but Gesh was already lumbering through the undergrowth, striding along like a Bunyan, and I hurried to keep up. I don’t know what I expected to find — half-eaten human carcasses dangling from the trees, a cache of automatic weapons or an angel-dust factory — but I should have guessed. “Wait up,”

Phil called. Weeds slapped at my face, a branch snagged the sleeve of my shirt. I focused on Gesh’s back, birds hissed in the trees, something darted off through the bushes, and suddenly we were standing at the edge of a sunlit clearing between walls of oak and laurel. I took it all in at a glance: the gray splintered tree stumps, the chicken-wire fencing, the sunken rims of the holes. Strips of corrugated aluminum had been driven into the ground at the base of the fence, as if at the border of some suburban zucchini patch, and hundreds of twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups littered the area, crushed underfoot, caught up in the roots of bushes, while deflated plastic bags advertised a Polk Street party supply house. There was garden hose, too, great sun-bleached coils of it, and crumpled half-empty sacks of fertilizer from which jagged clumps of weed had begun to sprout.

Gesh stood in the midst of this desolation, hands on hips. Phil and I were spouting expletives and taking the name of God in vain. We were like children exposed to the ugly underbelly of Fantasyland, the dirt and grease and grinding gears beneath the pristine forest floor. “Pot!” I shouted, surprised at my own emotion. “The son of a bitch was growing pot up here and Vogelsang never said a word about it.”

It was true, it was incontrovertible. If the Leakeys had problems interpreting the archaeological record at Olduvai, this was a snap — it couldn’t have been clearer had Jones left a diary with photographs. He’d used the Styrofoam cups to sprout his seedlings, and he’d dug the holes — as we would — to create a controlled environment for his maturing plants. But what went wrong? Or had it gone wrong? Maybe Jones was in Rio at that very moment, parading around in a Nixon mask and doing cocaine till his septum dissolved. I had a fleeting vision of palm trees, the girl from Ipanema, the mask, the cocaine and a water glass of dark Jamaican rum, but it was almost immediately supplanted by a vivid recollection of the Eldorado County Jail and the look of unreasoning hatred on Officer Jerpbak’s face.

“Hey, what’s this?” Phil said, fishing a flat wooden object from the weeds. I saw rust, a spring and a coil of steel wire. It looked like a rat trap.

“Looks like a rat trap,” Gesh said. I studied the ground. There must have been fifty of them in plain sight. I remembered the rats or squirrels I’d seen the first day — big brown things the size of footballs. There was a connection here, a nasty connection. But I wasn’t ready to make it.

For the next ten minutes or so we poked around Jones’s growing area (Smith, Jones: was anybody really named Smith or Jones?), uncovering rat traps, checking the chicken wire fences, gazing up at the sky in an effort to gauge the area’s vulnerability to aerial detection. Then we continued along the road and discovered that it gradually wound back on itself and joined our driveway just below Sapers’s house. On the way back I said I didn’t like the fact that someone had tried to farm the place before us. Phil didn’t like it either. “I wish I knew whether Jones was lying on a beach in the Bahamas or out on bail,” he said. Gesh spat in the dirt. He was climbing the hill with his long loping strides, breathing hard. “At least we know where to put the fence up,” he said.