T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

One Jerpbak, two Jerpbak, three: I pivoted and found myself locking eyes with a scowling cop in his late forties who looked as if he’d devoted his life to the invention of instruments of torture. There was no trace of sympathy or decency in his face, but I felt like embracing him, buying him a cigar, stuffing twenties in his pocket — he might have been an inveterate suspect-beater and civil-rights abuser for all I knew, but he wasn’t Jerpbak. The realization so elated me that I lurched forward and tripped over his slick black-booted foot. As I tumbled past him, fighting for balance and yelping an apology over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the second cop, the one whose back had for the last ten minutes been so alarmingly contiguous to mine. A glimpse of reflecting shades, cleft chin, clipped and parted hair. That was enough. I slammed into the cigarette machine, tore open the door and flung myself at the cleansing, quickening rain.

A moment later the door eased open and Phil joined me on the front steps. He asked if I was all right. I told him I just needed a little air, that’s all. We started for the pickup in silence, raindrops slanting down like so many straight pins. I hardly noticed. All that mattered was that they were watching us (I knew they were, as certainly as I knew that forests are immovable and men born of women), observing the way we lifted our feet and hunched our shoulders, noting the make of the truck and the license plate number, idly fingering their handcuffs. Police surveillance, I thought. Undercover operations. Tapes, photographs, body hairs. Suddenly I saw myself at the window of the cabin, opening up on them with the shotgun, stopping bullets with my teeth, vanishing in a puff of smoke. I slipped the keys into Phil’s hand. “What’s this?” he said. “You don’t want to drive?”

“No, I don’t feel up to it,” I said, climbing into the passenger’s seat. The pickup was loaded with plastic pipe in twenty-foot lengths, with four fifty-five-gallon drums and a gasoline-powered water pump. I was trying my best to look like a tourist or hitchhiker, but I knew it was hopeless. We might as well have painted the truck Day-Glo orange with vermilion pinstriping and the legend DR. FEELGOOD’S FARMS. We were dope farmers — that was as readily apparent to any fool on the street as our species identification — dope farmers stockpiling equipment for their irrigation system. I hunched down in the seat.

“So,” Phil said, grinding the ignition, “I didn’t tell you the best part yet.” I was mute, cataleptic. He went on anyway. “Well, Borka ducks into this cave to escape a column of Termagants from the planet Terma, when he miraculously comes upon four of the sexes trying to get it on — but of course they’re missing the fifth link, which just happens to be this armless man-sized thing with a little penis and a prehensile tail. So here comes the space hero, fascinated, watching these four weird creatures go at it, heaving and rocking in frustration …”

The truck jerked back, drawing away from the cafée A like a missile from the launching pad. I fought the impulse to look up. Fought it, and lost. As Phil swung around and shifted gears, I snatched a glance out of the corner of my eye. I saw the cruiser with its gold badge of justice, the cracked cinder blocks of the front porch, the little box of the cafée A with its picture windows and advertisements for corn dogs and thick shakes. Light fell from the windows in slabs. I could see nothing. And then, just a flash: dark forms, bereft of animation, as shadowy and insubstantial as the figures in a dream.

That night, after we’d unloaded the truck and put dinner on, I spread the Jerpbak article out on the kitchen table and motioned for Gesh to have a look. Gesh had spent the afternoon digging holes, and he was stretched out on the couch like a corpse, a hot toddy in one hand and Book One of The Ravishers of Pentagord —Phil’s trilogy — in the other. From the front bedroom I could hear Phil strumming his guitar and moaning softly. “What is it?” Gesh said. “What have you got — drugs?”

My throat thickened. I didn’t think I could get the words out. “It’s an article. In the paper. Come take a look.”

Gesh sighed, pushed himself up and started across the room. I was poised over the gray newsprint, scanning the article for the twentieth time, each insidious phrase poking at me like a hot scalpel. Gesh was in no hurry. He paused to refresh his toddy and slip a tape into his cracked-plastic battery-powered tape player (he’d unearthed two cassettes in the glove compartment of the Jeep Vogelsang had left us — something unidentifiable that sounded like a diva gargling in the shower, and an ancient Grateful Dead tape that repeatedly stuck on “Truckin’.” He opted for the latter).

Busted, down an Bourbon Street,

Set up, like a bowlin’ pin …

I watched Gesh’s face as he read the article. When he’d finished he took a sip of his toddy, looked up at me and said “So?”

“So?” I could feel the floodgates opening wide. “What’s with you? Don’t you know who this joker is?” I was shouting, rapping Jerpbak’s photograph with the back of my hand as if I could tear him in the flesh.

Gesh looked less certain of himself. He shrugged.

“This is the maniac that threw me up against the wall in the Eldorado County Jail when I bailed you guys out. Now he’s here, dedicating his life to busting dope farmers — I mean, doesn’t that strike you as a little strange?”

Gesh just stared at the paper, his jaw locked. The tape player slammed away at “Truckin’ “ over and over again: Truckin’ … Truckin’ … Truckin’ … I stalked over and hit the eject button. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he murmured. And then more forcefully: “It’s a pisser. A real weird coincidence and a bad break. But nothing to go crazy over.”

Phil appeared in the doorway of his room, the guitar strung round his neck like an umpire’s chest protector. “What’s all the commotion?”

I showed him the article. He held the paper close to his face, licking his lips and sucking in his breath in quick little puffs as he read.

“We just have to be extra careful, that’s all,” Gesh said.

Phil folded the newspaper neatly and set it down on the counter. Then he looked me in the eye, poker-faced, and hit the refrain of “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”

“Very funny,” I said.

If Phil could clown about it, I couldn’t. I was tense, shaken, wired to the breaking point. Things were conspiring against us, all our sweat and toil come to naught: we weren’t going to wind up rich, we were going to wind up in jail.

“We’ll stick to the back roads,” Gesh said. Back roads? What was he talking about — there were nothing but back roads. “And instead of buying supplies in Willits, we’ll go all the way down to Santa Rosa, where nobody’ll notice.”

I didn’t want to end up in jail. But even worse than the thought of jail was the thought of the bust itself. A dozen troopers, in riot helmets and flak jackets, bursting through the door at first light, roughing us up, rifling our possessions, hauling us off in sorrow and subjection — it had become the standard nightmare. Still worse was its corollary, its sad and inevitable conclusion: detection would mean the end of the project, the failure of the farm.

Something had happened to me over the course of the past few weeks, something that transformed me with each crank of the come-along and thrust of the shovel: I’d become a believer. Perhaps it was the evangelical fervor with which Phil, Gesh and even Dowst regarded the project, perhaps it was the callus I’d developed on my hands and feet or the strips of muscle that corrugated my back and swelled the veins of my arms — but whatever it was, I’d been bitten more deeply than I realized. If I’d entered into the thing as a lark, an adventure, attracted as much by the action as the money, I was now fully, absolutely and zealously committed to making it work.