T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Here we go, I thought. I could feel the dollars slipping from my pocket, the seedlings wilting, the clash of personality like an early frost, an ill wind, like blight and scale and rot. Vogelsang cocked his head and leaned forward, his lips tight with a thin bemused smile. He could have been a headmaster bending an ear to an ingenuous and sadly misinformed pupil.

“First of all,” Gesh said, his voice strangled with the effort to control it, “I don’t like this business of you sniffing wine corks down at Vanessi’s and la-de-dahing around Bolinas while we’re busting our asses up here with no electricity and broken-down equipment, in the fucking rain, freezing our balls off, and then the quote expert shows up a week and a half late, and you, you come waltzing in the door like this was a costume ball at the Lions’ Club or something. …”

Phil was licking mustard from his fingers, both irises locked in alert alignment, while Aorta, unconcerned, a creature of another species, insentient, slow-blooded, ducked through the doorway with sacks of groceries and laid them on the counter like the offerings they were. Gesh’s voice nagged on, expressing deep and insupportable disaffection with everything, from lack of direction and equipment to the leaky roof and the holes in his boots and underwear. I could see the lines being drawn, the sides forming up: slaves and overseers, coolies and satraps, workers and bosses.

Yes, you know when I begin to farm ,

My old boss be didn’t want to furnish me ,

He bad one mule name’ Jack, an’ one name’ Trigger ,

All the money for him an’ none for the nigger.

So could Vogelsang. He was nervous, hyperkinetic, scratching round the room like a dog looking for a place to squat. Pursing his lips, he did his best to look thoughtful and conciliatory — contrite, even. When Gesh finally wound down, Vogelsang parried with sympathy, promises, a waved fistful of cash — he actually extracted a roll of bills from his pocket and waved it like a flag of truce — and a pep talk worthy of Winston Churchill in his finest hour. He planned to stay for the next six days— at least , he said. He’d brought groceries, supplies, equipment, booze, cash, pot, a Monopoly board, cheap paperbacks, a four-wheel-drive vehicle. “And Boyd,” he said, summing up, delivering the clincher, “Boyd’s planning to stay on without a break until all the seedlings are in the ground and the growing areas enclosed.”

“Seedlings, shit,” Gesh growled, but I could see that he was mollified. In the space of three minutes Vogelsang had managed to reassure us that we hadn’t been neglected, that he’d foreseen everything and was prepared to lay out the capital to meet all our needs, and that, most important, our project was not doomed to failure, not at all — no, this was just the beginning. Everything was all right. We were going to make it. We were going to beat the system. We were going to be rich.

And then, seeing his opening, Vogelsang took the offensive. “I might remind you, friend,” he said, his words diced as if by a dozen quick knife-strokes, “that I’m the one who’s putting up the capital for this little venture, and that I’m under no obligation to be up here at all. In fact, once things get rolling, you’re going to see less and less of me.”

“Less?” Gesh lurched out of the chair. He stopped three feet short of Vogelsang, jabbing his index finger at him. “You tell me: what’s less than nothing?”

The smile was frozen to Vogelsang’s face. For an instant something flickered in his eyes, something like emotion, but he killed it.

And then Phil was stepping between them like a rodeo clown, shuffling his feet and ducking his shoulders. His mouth was full and we couldn’t catch what he was saying at first, but he was bowing and sweeping his arm in a grand comic gesture. Then he swallowed, hefted the blackened pot from the stove and set it down on the table. “Soup’s on,” he said.

There were two and a half gallons of soup. Unidentifiable chunks of meat or vegetable matter bobbed in a greasy slick that reeked of black pepper and garlic. It was food, that’s all that mattered. We crowded round the caldron like the half-starved bricklayers of Ivan Denisovich , ravenous after a long morning of physical labor. Hands grabbed for bread, spoons, bowls. Vogelsang, I assumed, would decline to join us.

I was wrong. He dipped his bowl into the pot like a true son of the proletariat, squatted down before the stove, and broke bread with us. Perhaps he didn’t have the faintest idea of how people related to one another, perhaps the quotidian range of human emotion was an enigma to him, but there was no denying this: he knew how to take charge of the situation.

After lunch, Vogelsang tinkered with the generator for ten minutes or so and then fired it up with a sudden blatting roar that obliterated the solitude of the hills and froze my heart like a block of ice. “Shut it off,” I screamed, bursting from the house, where the lightbulbs had begun to glow dimly. He glanced up at me, then leaned over and shorted the spark plug with a plastic-grip screwdriver. “Works fine,” he said.

“But the noise — they’ll hear it for miles. It’s like Pearl Harbor or something.” (I could picture the town sheriff spilling his coffee every time we started the thing up. “What the sufferin’ Jesus is that ?” he asks the basset-faced deputy. “It’s them city boys,” the deputy says, “up on the old Gayeff place. Lloyd Sapers says they’re growin’ corn or somethin’ out the side of a mountain. What you make of that, Ormand?”)

Vogelsang stood. “Yes, well — you’ve got a problem there. Maybe you could use it sparingly, huh?”

Then he was off with Dowst for a tour of the plantation — an antebellum cotton farmer overseeing the darkies’ efforts — while we labored with come-along and fence-pounder at growing area number three, a grassy slope we’d dubbed “Julie Andrews’s Meadow” because its blues and greens looked like something done in CinemaScope. That night there were six of us for dinner, and as we sat beneath the brownly glowing light-bulbs and suffered the ratchetting shriek of the generator, we found we had some rethinking to do and some hard questions to lay bare.

“I can appreciate how hard you fellows have been working,” Vogelsang said, “and I think that second growing area you’ve picked is ideal, but some of the fencing you’ve done is … well, I don’t think you’ve got the idea.”

We were seated on the floor, gathered in a semicircle round the wood stove. Dowst, Vogelsang, Aorta, me, Phil, Gesh. Dowst and Vogelsang were eating reconstituted black mushroom soup and freeze-dried paella out of plastic bowls from Dowst’s backpacking kit. The rest of us — Aorta included — were eating blood-raw steaks, canned beans and French bread, courtesy of Vogelsang. A jug of Cribari red occupied the place of honor in the center of the floor.

“What do you mean?” Phil said.

“Well, listen. I don’t think we have to string barbed wire around the growing areas.” I began to protest — we’d nearly killed ourselves over that wire — but Vogelsang anticipated me. “Now hear me out — this’ll save you a lot of work. The way I see it, and Boyd agrees with me, the only place we need barbed wire is along the border of Lloyd Sapers’s property.”

“Now he tells us,” Phil said.

Gesh filled a twelve-ounce Styrofoam cup with wine and glared at Dowst and Vogelsang as if they’d just nailed his mother to a tree. Phil wiped his plate mournfully, while I toyed with a crust of bread, overcome with the sort of plummeting despair you feel when you’re driving coast to coast and suddenly realize, in the dead of night, that you’ve been going in the wrong direction for the past three hours, the oil light is flashing, you’re nearly out of gas, and your dog is not curled comfortably asleep in the back seat as you’d supposed, but was abandoned along the strip of crapped-over grass at the last truck stop. I watched as Dowst sucked beige droplets of soup from his mustache. His shirt was pressed and his hands were as white and unblemished as bars of soap. Aorta chewed steak.