T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“It’s the cows the barbed wire will keep out. And the cows are ranging all over Sapers’s place, and ours, too. Right, Boyd?”

Dowst nodded, dabbing at his mustache with a paper towel. “We saw three of them on the property today. And you know what that means — the cows get lost and then the cowboys come looking for them.”

“Right,” Vogelsang said, the paella going cold in his lap, “that’s what I mean. We fence the property line — just on Sapers’s side — and then we avoid that sort of, ah, confrontation.”

“And the growing areas?” I said.

“Deer fencing.” I watched Vogelsang raise a forkful of rice to his lips, then put it down again. “Clear the area, fence for deer, dig the holes, lay the irrigation pipe and watch the plants grow.”

“One deer,” Dowst said, holding up a single finger for emphasis, “could eat twenty plants in a night. And the barbed wire does nothing for them — they just jump right over it.”

Gesh suddenly got to his feet, stalked across the room and out the door. Left ajar, the door swung lazily back on its hinges, and the room filled with the clatter of the generator. “What’s with him?” Dowst said. I shrugged. The noise was excruciating. I was about to get up and slam the door when the lights failed and the roar abruptly died — with a choking, throttled cough and an explosion of backfire. One thousand, two thousand, three — I counted off the seconds as we sat in absolute, intergalactic darkness, the silence drawn over us like a cloak. Then a light appeared, wavering, and Gesh stepped back into the room with a Coleman lantern.

“Too much racket,” he murmured. “Makes me nervous.”

Vogelsang was nodding in affirmation. He’d repaired the generator as a concession to our needs, but I knew he was against it. Perhaps — and the thought was like the first trickle of gravel that precipitates a landslide — perhaps he’d perforated the muffler or something to make it louder still, his way of subtly demonstrating that comfort wasn’t worth the price of exposure. Certainly the thing could be heard from the main road, and who knew what sort of visitors it might attract — people like Sapers, or worse. (Sapers’s place glowed with cheap, silent, efficient wattage, incidentally. The PG&E line climbed the mountain as far as his house, and as I would one day discover, he’d paid a tidy sum for the privilege. But that’s another story.) “I think you’re right,” Vogelsang said, and I suddenly realized it was the first time he and Gesh had agreed on anything.

Gesh set the lantern on the table, stepped between Vogelsang and Dowst, eased himself down beside Phil and reached for his plate. Dowst murmured something to Vogelsang about the temperature in the greenhouse, Gesh addressed himself to a mound of pinto beans, and Aorta turned to me and asked, as if she’d been considering the question all evening, “You into music?”

“Music?” I echoed, as if I’d never heard the term before. “Yeah. Sure. Of course. Who isn’t?”

“Ever hear of the Nostrils?”

I’d already failed. I shook my head sadly.

“I sing with them.”

“Oh, yeah? Really?” This was the first time she’d initiated a conversation, the first time she’d said anything in my hearing other than yes, no, hello, goodbye. I was interested. I was also, after three celibate weeks on the mountain, consumed with lust. I studied the slope of her breast, the swell of her calf, the neat red laces of her suede hiking boots, and tried to picture her engaged in deviant acts. Outside, in the greenhouse, seeds were sprouting.

She shifted her buttocks, bent to her plate and took a forkful of meat. “Yeah,” she said, white teeth, black lips, chewing. “I think you’d like us.” She was about to say more when Gesh cleared his throat and said, “So, Herb, why don’t you tell us about Jones.”

Silence.

Vogelsang looked uncomfortable. He looked besieged, hunted, weary, looked like a man who could think of better ways to spend his time — pressing pasta and stuffing weasels, for instance. I wondered how long he could keep his equanimity. “Who?” he said.

“You know: Jones. Dude that was up here last year, growing pot?” Gesh never stopped pushing, but he was right. If Vogelsang was hiding something, we were entitled to know about it.

“I don’t know why you didn’t tell us,” I said. “It seems pretty significant, doesn’t it, to know that somebody tried to farm the place before us?”

“No big deal,” Dowst said, cutting in. “We knew he’d been busted—”

“Busted?” There was a chorus of cries.

“—and we figured he’d probably been doing some farming up here, but we never found any evidence of it.”

“Yeah, and I’ll bet you looked real hard, too,” Gesh said.

“Busted?” I repeated, incredulous.

“On the highway, Felix,” Vogelsang said, in control again, “miles from here. The way I heard it, he was sitting in a line of cars — they were doing roadwork and only one lane was open — and he tossed a joint to this long-haired ditchdigger. Five miles up the road the CHP nailed him for possession. Stupid, that’s all.”

“But he had a trailer up here,” I said. “You must have known he wasn’t up here for his health.”

“Yes, well. As Boyd said, we assumed he’d been doing a little cultivating, but that really didn’t affect us. He had an address someplace in North Beach. I figure he got a little paranoid after the bust, harvested early and cleared out — if he harvested at all.”

Dowst smoothed the collar of his shirt and then set the plastic bowl down beside the plastic utensils. He could have been on a camping trip to commemorate his tenth-year Andover reunion. “So there’s nothing to connect Jones with the place — it’s irrelevant. Jones is irrelevant.”

“Not if El Ranchero Grande next door knows about him,” Phil countered. “ ’Up to no good’ is what he said.”

“Yeah.” I was getting incensed, strung-out, suspicious. “And if Sapers thinks Jones was up to no good, what do you suppose he thinks we’re doing? Writing? With a come-along?”

Vogelsang shrugged. He looked tired.

Jail cells, I thought, dawn raid, yellow toilet, hardened criminals, buggery. I was picturing the three of us, shackled together, jackets pulled up over our heads, half a dozen Jerpbaks prodding us with nightsticks, when Gesh suddenly hammered the floor with his fist. He was shouting. “Come on, Vogelsang, you son of a bitch — you put Jones up to it, didn’t you? Huh? Just like us.”

Aorta’s eyes glowed like neon. Dowst swiped at his hair. I could hear crickets or locusts or something going at it outside as if they were laying down the backing track for a horror film. With exaggerated calm, Vogelsang leaned forward to pour himself a glass of wine. He took a long sip, and then held Gesh’s eyes. “I’ll show you the deed to the property,” he said. “I bought the place in February. From a fellow named Strozier — Frederick C. W. Strozier.” Vogelsang shifted his gaze now, expanding his field of vision to include Phil and me. “Go ask him. Maybe Jones was working for him” —giving us the Charlie Manson stare—“just as you, my friends, are working for me.”

Gesh muttered an obscenity, his voice so thick it could have been dubbed. I wondered if he’d been rat-holing Quaaludes.

“You’re in or you’re out,” Vogelsang said, hard now, no patience left, the bargain-driver and market-manipulator. “Either trust me or pack it in.”

I knew at that moment I should take him up on it — pack it in, get out, get clear. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. We’d just got there, the seeds were burgeoning in the dark moist earth of the greenhouse, Rio awaited. “Okay,” I said, answering for all of us. “Okay. But no more secrets.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “What about the calendar?”