T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

How else could I have gone on, day after day, pitching dirt and hammering fenceposts like a flunky? How else if I wasn’t certain in the very root of my being, in the last looping curve of my innermost gut, that we would succeed? No gains without pains , Poor Richard said. Plough deep … and you shall have corn to sell and to keep. Yes, indeed. We would subdue the land, make it produce, squeeze the dollars from it through sacrifice, sheer force of will and Yankee gumption. It was the dream of the pioneers themselves.

But I was no pioneer. I was edgy, nervous, a chronic quitter. If I understand now how deeply involved I was in the summer camp — it had to succeed, not so much for the money itself or what it could buy, but as the tangible and final result of our labor, the fruit of our enterprise, the proof of the dream — I did not understand it then. Not that night. Not there in the kitchen, my face hot with the glow of the lantern and the shock of Jerpbak. Maybe I was being irrational, loosing my fears like hobgoblins and bogies — but then the calendar and Jerpbak’s reemergence were irrational, too. I was spooked. I was angry.

“Okay,” Phil said, “we’re all a little paranoid. But just because of one newspaper article and a couple of cops that just happen to sit behind us in a diner, for Christ’s sake …” He waved his hand as if he were swatting gnats.

Gesh ran his fingers through his hair, then settled himself on the edge of the table and folded his arms. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, “I think you’re blowing things way out of proportion, man. Sure it’s bad news that this fucking jerk is launching a one-man crusade to bust dope farmers, but you got to remember there’s a lot of dope farmers out there. To think he’s out to get you is insane, it’s preposterous.”

“Dr. Freud, I presume?” Phil said. He tried to shake my hand but I pulled away.

“I mean, do you really think he bugged the ashtray in your Toyota or something — just because you made an illegal U-turn?”

I had to get out. The pressure was building in me like beer on a full bladder. I snatched my jacket from the chair and slammed out the door.

The night was torn with ragged clouds. Stars whitened the gaps, crickets pulsed like a heartbeat. Somewhere a tree groaned. There was a breeze — damp, fragrant — a southerly breeze that smelled as if it had rattled coconut palms and lifted the scent from hibiscus and frangipani. It wafted up now, a touch of warmth, out of the darkness that engulfed our lower growing areas. I gazed at the sky, clear in the interstices all the way back to the molars of the galaxy, and did not think the least thought about man’s fate, the unfathomable universe or group sex on Pentagord. I thought of things worldly and quotidian. Jerpbak. The greenhouse. Mysteriously blighted seedlings.

I breathed deeply — spring breeze, late April already — urinated in the model hole and fumbled my way to the greenhouse. The feather-light door swung back on the hinges I’d installed, and I stepped in and surrendered to the rank wild odor of working soil, of fertility and the dark germ of life. Dowst’s flashlight hung from a bent nail just inside the door. I found it and let the tube of light play over the ranks of Styrofoam cups, the stunted and late-emerging plants we’d yet to put in the ground and the flashing strips of aluminum foil Dowst had tacked up as reflectors. He’d arranged the planters on racks in ascending tiers — like grandstands — with a narrow footpath in between. Still agitated, I threaded my way up the path, thinking to find solace in the still, burgeoning atmosphere. It was a mistake. With the healthy plants already in the ground, the place looked barren. I surveyed it slowly, dismally, the husks of dead plantlings brushing at my pants, new growth spotting the remaining cups like a sprinkle in the desert.

Dowst had left for Marin three days earlier, in quest of the seeds we so desperately needed to make up our deficit (with just over a thousand seedlings planted, we needed at least nine hundred more to approach our original estimate). There were, he insisted, entrepreneurs who let their fall crops go to seed to provide for the germinatory needs of people like us — for a price, of course. A price that would come out of our net profit. And though it was a pity that the germination rate of his own seeds hadn’t been higher — that’s nature’s choice, he said, clucking his tongue — he was confident he could obtain more than enough new seeds to suit our purposes. As I stood there counting cups in the tenebrous cave of the greenhouse, I hoped he was right.

Nearly three-quarters of the cups were empty. In some there was no evidence whatever that anything had been planted; in others, wilted brown stalks gave testimony to some inscrutable depredation. Phil maintained that the locusts were responsible — couldn’t we hear them screeching in the trees? Gesh thought it might be aphids. Or beetles or something. Dowst, standing firm on the quality of his seeds, theorized that a fungus may have been attacking the roots of the young plants. I was puzzled, distressed. I’d watched the infinitesimal green filaments emerge from the earth, crooked as sweetly as dollar signs, and then come back the following morning to see that they’d been grazed to the root as I slept. Night after night I stalked the greenhouse, sitting in darkness, breath suspended, ears perked, waiting for the telltale crunch of mandibles or the scurry of soleless feet, and always I’d been skunked. There was nothing there — neither beetles nor aphids. Nor snails, leafhoppers, fruit flies or flying sheep for that matter. Just a silence, a silence so absolute I imagined I could hear the seeds rupturing their shells. Now, as I probed the cluttered corners with the flashlight, a sinking defeated feeling took hold of me — as if I’d been crushed under and sucked dry like a bad seed — and suddenly I understood that I was looking at the greenhouse for the last time.

It was an old feeling, compounded of fury and despair, a choking impotent rage that could only be salved by turning away, by running. I’d felt it when I reread the same page of Carlyle for the fiftieth time, stuffed my books in a trashcan and took the bus for San Francisco while Ronnie waited tables and old Dr. Pengrave sat checking his watch and fussing over the exam questions he’d never get to ask me. I’d felt it in Boston, looking out from the projectionist’s booth at the nodding heads and listening to the furtive clatter of white port bottles on the stained cement floor. I’d felt it when I was out of work and out of luck and Ronnie came home and told me she’d been accepted in the MBA program at Wharton and I looked up from my magazine and told her I wasn’t moving. Yes: then especially. I remembered the look on her face, the way she held out the acceptance letter as if it were the deed to an oil well or a certificate of beatification. I put you through four years of grad school, she said. Four years. Now it’s my turn.

Death, defeat, futility, that’s what the greenhouse said to me. I turned my back on it. Like a magic lantern — magnetic, irresistible — the flashlight pulled me across the junk-strewn morass of the lot and on up to the door of the Toyota. I dropped the flashlight in the high grass, dug for my keys and fired up the car with a roar. A moment later I was yawing through the undergrowth and heaving down the gutted road to the highway. The headlights grabbed at the darkness like pincers, trees rocked over me, a deer sprang up and vanished like an illusion. I thought of my apartment. Of movie theaters and Thai food and color TV. Of my stereo, my drip coffee maker, of daily newspapers, books, magazines, of the society of men — and women. Branches swiped at the windshield, a rock exploded against the under-surface of the car, ruts and gullies grabbed the wheel from me and flung it back again. Carefully, carefully, I told myself. I was on my way home.