T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

No reaction.

“You know what I mean, Vogelsang, come on. The calendar, the one you dug up in the shed and hung in the bedroom.” I felt something rising in my throat — gas, maybe. My heart had begun to hammer. “The calendar,” I repeated. “The joke.”

He looked up at me as if he hadn’t heard, looked up as if he were deaf and dumb. His face was blank, no glimmer of comprehension in his eyes. He could have been aphasic, could have been a tourist who had no grasp of English. Worse: he could have been innocent.

Like the Savior at Golgotha, Vogelsang stayed three days. On the morning of the third day he arose and assembled us for instruction in the use and maintenance of firearms. We stood out front of the house confronting a series of makeshift targets — bottles, cans, Mason jars, a grid of two-by-fours faced with plywood and clumsily inscribed with sagging concentric circles. This last, mounted on stilts and angling backward like an artist’s easel, explained the persistent hammering that had jolted me awake at the hour of the wolf. I breathed on my hands and then thrust them into my pockets. It was foggy and cold, dew beading our vehicles and the mounds of rusted machine parts that lay scattered in the high grass like the remnants of a forgotten civilization. Clumps of mist clung to the trees like balls of hair in the bristles of a brush. The model hole, a few yards to our left, was water-filled and rimmed with fingers of ice.

I was contemplating our new vehicle — an open Jeep of ancient vintage with big heavy-grid tires that had unfortunately gone bald — when Dowst emerged from his van, clean-shaven and alert. There was a notebook clenched under his arm and a row of pens clipped to his pocket — he could have been back at Yale, loping off to attend an early lecture on bryophytes. He slogged his way through the weeds, sidestepped the hole and joined us on the improvised firing line. “Going to take notes?” I said. Phil giggled. Dowst gave me an odd look, held out the notebook and flipped through the pages for me. I saw maps of the property, pages of calculations and formulas, notes on fertilizers, soils, mean temperatures and annual rainfall. Humbled, I ducked my head and spat in the grass.

Then the door slammed behind me and I turned to watch as Aorta picked her way toward us. “Good morning,” she croaked, her voice ragged and raw. The cropped hair lay flat against the crown of her head; she was makeup-less and huddled in her silver jacket like a runaway. I rubbed my palms together and gave her a weak smile.

“Anything happens,” Vogelsang was saying, “and your obvious choice is the shotgun.” His eyes were hard, glacial, veins stood out in his neck. I was thinking of drill instructors, Fort Hood, recruits dying in basic training — eighteen years old and their hearts give out — when Vogelsang handed me the gun.

I didn’t know what to do. I was prepared to fire the thing — in fact, in a childish sort of way I was looking forward to it. But not first. No. First I wanted to watch Vogelsang bring it to his shoulder, sight down the barrel, squeeze off a round or two; I wanted to hear the roar, see the target totter, gauge the force of the recoil. Life was full of surprises, most of them unpleasant. Why rush into things?

Vogelsang was lecturing, his words coming at me as if from a great distance: “Ithaca. Twelve-gauge. Pump. Double-ought shot.” I held the gun stiffly, like an artificial limb. Flesh soup, I thought. Ground round. Then Vogelsang took my arm and indicated a target set apart from the rest — a pillow perched atop a peeling three-legged end table, no more than thirty feet away. He had painted a Kilroy face on it, eyes, nose, slashes for eyebrows, and a big grinning circus mouth. “Go ahead, Felix,” he said. “Let it rip.”

I felt silly. “That?”

“Go ahead.”

I put the gun to my shoulder and squinted down the barrel. The sight was a flap of metal, an M , and I peered through the cleft of it with one eye shut, lining up first the table, and then the big sloppy mouth of my bitterest enemy, the crop-stealer, the desperado, the rip-off artist. It was like taking a photograph. Dying color. I concentrated on an image of Robin Hood splitting arrows, held my breath, and pinned the trigger.

There was a roar. The table splintered, the pillow exploded in a puff of feathers: now you see it, now you don’t. I was startled — not only by the volume of the blast but by the violence of the recoil, which slammed at my collarbone like a karate chop — so startled I nearly dropped the gun. Through the ringing in my ears I could hear Vogelsang’s laughter. I suppose it was funny, my juggling the thing as if it were hot, my confusion, my fear. The ineluctable modality of the risible. “Well shot, Felix,” he said between gasps. “You see my point?”

I saw his point. Where table and pillow had formerly stood, there were only feathers, sifting down like a meteorological aberration. There was no reason even to aim the thing. Just blast away. Destruction. Devastation. Annihilation. I saw his point. But I didn’t like the way in which he’d made it. Not especially. So I turned round, hands trembling, and pumped another shell into the chamber — Vogelsang’s face went cold; beyond him I could see Gesh, Phil, Aorta, Dowst, smiles freezing as if the wind had suddenly shifted and brought with it a whiff of something foul — and then swung leisurely on the other targets.

“Hey!” Vogelsang waved his arms. “No!”

I wasn’t listening: I was aiming. Fifty feet. What was that — a cider jug? Yes. I could read the label. Apple Time. Unsweetened. “Felix!”

Cold steel, hot blast: the gun answered for me. And then again, and again.

In all, including Phil and me, there were seven customers in the caféeA when the CHP cruiser swung off 101 and nosed into the parking lot. We were sitting at a window booth. Relaxing. Eating. Enjoying a supply run and a two-hour break from the routine of the summer camp. In the booth across from us, a brittle-haired woman in her mid-fifties carped at her daughter, while the daughter’s daughter, a two-year-old, kicked at the tabletop. The other denizens of the place — aside from the withered old crone in the checked mini-skirt who performed the multiple functions of chef, waitress and cashier — were two old men, in identical overalls and sun-bleached shirts, who sat at opposite ends of the counter, stolidly blowing into cups of coffee.

Nearly four weeks had passed since we’d last seen Vogelsang, and during that time we’d made determined progress, managing to enclose eight of twelve growing areas, fence the property line between our place and Sapers’s, dig twelve hundred holes, and reverentially transplant every last one of the healthy seedlings Dowst had sprouted. Unfortunately, less than twenty percent of the seeds had proven viable, and we wound up with only about fifteen hundred seedlings, a third of which fell prey to some mysterious enervating force in the greenhouse — fungus, leafhoppers, gamma rays, locusts, who could say? Dowst had assured us that he would come up with additional seeds to replace those that had failed. Of course, we would have to scale down our original estimate a bit, but still, even though the second crop would get into the ground a bit late, we should nevertheless come close to the full thousand pounds we’d projected. He was an optimist, Dowst. We looked at it philosophically. So we harvested nine hundred pounds instead of a thousand. Big deal. We’d be rich anyway.

I watched as the cruiser slunk across the lot, weaving in and out of potholes with a muscular grace that suggested a carnivore at ease — a panther, belly full, gliding along the path to its lair. Behind the windshield, which alternately reflected the clouds and darkened to transparency, I could make out the rigid forms of the officers themselves, twin pairs of mirror shades, a riot gun framed menacingly in the rear window. I looked away. And found that I was clutching a laminated menu: Two Eggs Any Style, Super Chili Beef Burger, Corn Dog — Try It! The waitress hovered over us with pencil and pad, and Phil, his voice saturated with ennui, was ordering. “The special,” he said. “That’s the stuffed cabbage with chili, right? And it comes with a side of coleslaw?”