T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“Bye, honey,” Shirelle said as we made for the door.

I looked back over my shoulder at the figures stationed round the room, Shirelle lushly replicated in her daughter, the slouching, twitching Sapers, George Pete’s wizened cohort, the Indians gliding in brilliant liquid motion over the pool table, and Marlon, mountainous, his big pale glowing visage hanging over the scene like a planetary orb. No one looked particularly sympathetic.

“Could I please have another Coke?” Marlon piped.

The door was swinging to. I heard Sapers’s shout, indistinct, competing with the jukebox and the clatter of glasses — I couldn’t be sure but I thought he was hollering about crops, now’s the time to get them crops into the ground, or something like that. Boom, the door slammed. Faintly, from within, I could still hear him: “Drunks!” he shouted. “Hypocrites!”

Then it was quiet. But for the hiss of the rain.

“Oh, Christ,” Phil said.

It was dark. The rain fell in cataracts. We ran for the pickup, sloshing through ankle-deep puddles, everything a blur. We should have walked. There was something in our urgency, in the frantic quickening pace of our legs, that triggered a corresponding impulse in the all-but-forgotten hyena-dog that had stared so implacably at us as we entered the bar, and had waited patiently through the decline of day and the onset of the steady chilling rain for just such an opportunity as this. I was halfway to the truck when a silent lunging form streaked from the shadows and fastened itself to my pant leg with a predatory snarl. Tripped up, I pitched forward into the darkness with a splash, aware of mud, water, the exploratory grip of jaws. And then I was face down in the rank wet dirt, rolling and tumbling like a man afire, flinging up first one arm and then the other as the dog raged over me in an allegro furioso of snapping teeth and stuttering growls. “Rimmer!” a voice shouted close by. George Pete’s voice. “You get out of that now!” And the dog was gone.

A mere twenty seconds had been extracted from my life. The violent conjunction of bodies, the interrupted flight, the accelerated heartbeat, the mud, the torn clothing, the raising of welts and breaking of skin — the assault was over before it began. I pushed myself up and limped to the truck, my sleeves shredded and pants flapping. Phil and Gesh were huddled inside. The engine roared, wipers clapped. “What the hell happened to you?” Phil said as I pulled myself into the cab like a flood victim flinging himself over the gunwales of the rescue boat. What could I say? Talk was cheap. I shrugged my shoulders.

Back at the summer camp, I took one look at Dowst’s censorious face and told him to go fuck himself. Then I dabbed my wounds with alcohol and slogged out to help my co-workers evacuate ruptured sacks of groceries in the grass and haul dissolving bags of manure to the storage shed. It was no fun. At one point Phil turned to me, rain in our faces, cans of beets, niblet corn and garden-fresh peas at our feet, the sorry scraps of superstrength, double-bottomed bags in our hands. “Okay, so we screwed up,” he said. “I’ll be the first to admit it.” The flashlight picked out a soggy loaf of French bread at my feet. Rain sifted through the trees. “We screwed up,” Phil repeated, “but at least we had a good time.”

Oiled, glistening, wicked, they lay on the table in grim tableau, in the sort of menacing still life you see in the newspapers under the headline ARSENAL SEIZED. Guns. Three of them. A.22, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and the most lethal-looking thing I’d seen outside of the reptile house at the San Francisco Zoo, a.357 magnum pistol.

“You can’t be too careful,” Vogelsang said, grinning his diseased grin. He was wearing a one-piece khaki jumpsuit, boot to throat, the kind of thing favored by astronauts or kiddies toddling off to bed. The gloves, hood and gauze face mask were neatly arranged on the crate beside him. Aorta, in a sheeny metallic jacket, was watching me as I fingered the weapons.

It was lunchtime. Soup was boiling over on the stove, the windows were steamed up. Our guests had just stepped through the door, weapons bristling, commandos on a raid. Vogelsang greeted me by name, nodded at Phil and Gesh, then spread the firearms out on the table. Phil hovered over the blistered wooden counter, masticating a bologna sandwich with the intensity of a beaver felling trees, and Gesh, sweat-stained and filthy, was propped up on the couch with a beer. Dowst was in the green house, where he’d been all morning, planting seeds in twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups.

“So how’s the moon launch going?” I said.

Vogelsang gave me a blank look, then grinned and tugged at the front of his jumpsuit. “You mean this?” he said. “Poison oak. I get it like the bubonic plague and leprosy wrapped in one.”

I hefted the shotgun judiciously, sighted down the barrel like a sharpshooter. Actually, I’d only fired a gun once in my life. Eleven years old, a Boy Scout for two months (after which I quit: too much marching and knot-tying), I lay on my belly in the dirt and clicked off round after round at a bull’s-eye target. I remembered the firecracker smell, the snap of the report, the quick thin puff of smoke. The scoutmaster leaned over me, his face stubbled with whiskers, and breathed terse commands in my ear. “Sight,” he whispered. “A hair to the left. Squeeze.”

The gun was surprisingly heavy, the trigger light: death instantaneous and irrevocable. “Do we really need this sort of thing?” I said, trying to sound casual. “I mean, a pistol that could blind an elephant — isn’t that a bit excessive?”

Gesh grunted. I couldn’t tell whether it was a grunt of disparagement or agreement. I glanced at him. He was sipping beer, eyes squinted over the tight high cheekbones. I knew the look: he was sorting things out, ordering the priority of his grievances before opening up on Vogelsang.

Vogelsang laughed. He’d led patrols in Vietnam, shot people from cover, garroted underfed Asians in secrecy and silence. “Look, Felix, you’re going to have a million and a half dollars’ worth of pot out there. Not only do you have to worry about the law, but you’ve always got the possibility that some hunter or one of these dirtbaggers will blunder across it. What would you do in their place? You know, out in the woods, poking around — maybe even looking for an illegal operation? I know what I’d do. I’d take it, no questions asked.”

If at some point I’d glamorized the outlaw life, the romance of the scam and all the rest, if at some point I’d pictured myself a latter-day Capone or Dillinger or Bugsy Malone, I suddenly saw the stark and nasty underside of the whole operation. Guns. I’d never imagined I would have to defend myself with a gun. Quit , a voice whispered in my ear. Get out now.

Vogelsang was studying my face, grinning still. He was enjoying this. “Come on, Felix,” he said. “Really, it’s no big deal.” He paused to produce the ever-present vial of breath neutralizer, working it rapidly between his palms as if he were starting a friction fire. “Chances are maybe one in a hundred that any-body’ll come around. But don’t you want some insurance if they do?”

What could I say? Vogelsang was pooh-poohing me, Aorta regarded me appraisingly, Phil and Gesh seemed to accept the presence of firearms as casually as they accepted the pork cheeks in bologna or the nitrites in beer. I was a man, a dope farmer, an outlaw and a flimflammer. The gun was as much a tool of my trade as the come-along or spade, and I would just have to get used to it. I shrugged.

Meanwhile, splayed out on the couch, his eyes like coiled snakes, Gesh had apparently sorted out his various complaints and decided to make his presence known. Suddenly he crushed the empty beer can in one callused fist and sent it rocketing across the room like a three-and-two fastball; it hit the kitchen wall with a cowbell clank, and rebounded neatly into an overflowing bag of garbage. Four heads turned toward him. “Listen, Herb,” he said, a peremptory edge to his voice, “I think we got a few things to discuss, brother, and guns is the least of them.”