T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“Half a quart of vinegar, a box of peppercorns and a whole shaker of salt — the whole damn thing — to a gallon of water,” George Pete’s crony said.

“What’s that for?” asked the broader of the two new arrivals, who seemed to be female. “Footsoak?”

“Oh, gawd.” George Pete’s crony rolled his bulging eyes. “Ever’body’s a iggoramus tonight — that’s my genuine Chesapeake Bay crab boil.”

The other old boy, the one in coveralls, was asleep, hands in his lap and forehead pressed to the bar as if he were a devotee of some obscure Far Eastern religion.

I felt warm. A voice mewled over the jukebox: Well, here I stand,/All alone with a broken heart,/I took three bennies/And now my semi-truck won’t start. Time escaped me. I had another cognac.

It was then, just after I’d ordered the second post-phone-call drink — or was it the third? — that I felt a pressure on my arm and turned to see that someone had taken possession of the stool next to mine. I was too far gone to be startled: it was Savoy. Her hand was on my arm, a tall frosted glass of Coke sizzled on the bar before her. She was wearing a low-cut blouse and one of those complicated uplift bras that separate the bosoms and present them like ripe mangoes. “Hi,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Oh,” I said, shrugging, waving my hand and licking the tips of my fingers like a third-base coach in the throes of a seizure, “it’s no big thing. Been keeping busy, that’s all.” Eugene’s locket clung to her throat like a magnet. I wanted to lick it.

“Yeah?” she said, grinning wide. “You living around here now or what?”

Boom , went the jukebox. Boom, boom, boom.

“Wanna dance?” I said.

She shook her head no and took a sip of her Coke. Pink lipstick, white straw. “Your name’s Felix, right?”

I nodded. “And you’re Savoy.” I grinned like a deviate, like a billy goat.

She ignored me. Sucked thoughtfully at her straw a moment. “So you guys living up here now or what?” she said, repeating her question with a slight but significant variation.

“Blood raw!” roared George Pete’s crony.

His interlocutor, who’d partially revived and propped his head on a bent elbow, squinted one eye and hissed, “Your ass!”

“Not really,” I lied.

She laughed, a rich musical sound that inflamed every fiber of my reproductive tract. “No,” she said, leaning into me, “I really want to know. I like you guys, I do.”

“Well, if you put it that way,” I said, making a stab at wit and raising my eyebrows to acknowledge the sexual innuendo, “we live in Berkeley, but we’ve been coming up here a lot — oh, it must be three or four times now — to go fishing, you know, trout and all.”

“Come off it. You’re living up by Lloyd Sapers’s place, aren’t you?”

“Sapers? Never heard of him.”

She looked offended, her mouth puckered in a little moue. “What do you take me for — stupid or something?”

“Hah!” shouted George Pete’s toothless compatriot, apropos of some culinary conviction forcefully expressed. “Hah! Hah! Hah! Don’t make me laugh.”

Savoy was staring into my eyes, cold and intent. A moment ago I’d felt warm, lit up, ready to lick the world: now I felt cold, cold, cold. “Come off it,” she repeated, as if she’d forgotten her lines. “Come off it, will you? Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there.”

In June, the weather altered abruptly. Whereas before we’d shivered through a perpetual riveting downpour that made every moment of hole-digging or fence-stringing a curse and a trial, now suddenly we blistered under an unmoving sadistic sun. It was as if we’d been magically transported — house, weeds, garbage and all — from the windward coast of Scotland to the desert outside Tucson. One night the wind rattled up out of the south with the choking roar of an invading army — trucks in low gear, feet tramping across the roof — and in the morning it was clear. And dry. So dry that Phil’s pompadour went permanently limp and our bathtowels stiffened to the consistency of redwood bark. You could feel the change in your nostrils, in your throat; you could hear it in the dry, tortured groans of the house, see it in the shimmering air and wilting weeds and in the slow-wheeling helices of vultures riding the thermal currents. Ninety-five degrees, ninety-six, one-oh-two. Lizards appeared from nowhere, as if they’d been conjured from the air, hummingbirds hung like mobiles over the bells of flowers, streams fell back and left their banks exposed like toothless gums. Mud caked, dried, fragmented to dust. The arid season was upon us.

We were ready for it. As ready as the reddest-necked cracker in the Imperial Valley, as ready as the Israelis on the Negev. Or so we thought. By May 31, when workers elsewhere were grilling hot dogs and singing “God Bless America,” we were putting the finishing touches to an elaborate irrigation system engineered by Vogelsang, approved by Dowst and realized (i.e., hauled, hammered, cut, glued, joined and bled over) by Phil, Gesh and me. The mainstay of this system was a used gasoline-powered water pump for which Vogelsang had paid $100 at a foreclosure sale. Theoretically, the pump would suck water from the year-round stream at the base of the mountain, force it through the camouflaged lengths of one-inch plastic pipe we’d laid and connected, and then push it all the way up the mountain’s five hundred fifty vertical feet and into the big horse-troughs situated above the Khyber Pass, our highest growing area. From there, the water would gravity-feed to smaller reservoirs consisting of clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums, and thence to the hand-held hoses from which we would provide each plant with the two to three gallons of water it needed daily.

The first problem we encountered was a familiar one: noise. When all the pipe had been painted, laid and linked, and all the connections made to the reservoirs, we gathered at the base of the hill to fire up the pump and inaugurate the system. It was a ceremonial occasion, and we stood around clutching slippery cans of beer while Vogelsang bent to make minute adjustments to the gasoline feed, the filter, the carburetor. Mosquitoes whined, the stream slid over obstructions with a languid splash and trickle. I thought of railroad men come together for the driving of the final spike, or boutonniered politicians toasting the first explosive rush of water that flooded the Erie Canal.

The day was hot, one of the first true scorchers we’d had, the sun raging through the trees like a forest fire. We were swallowed up in the clot of vegetation that lined the streambed, and it seemed as if the leaves caught and held the air until it reared up and slapped us in the face. Gesh was running sweat, his eyes slits, cheekbones glistening as if they’d been oiled; Phil’s clothes were soaked through; I could taste the salt on my lips. Only Vogelsang seemed oblivious to the heat. Dressed in goggles, gloves, surgeon’s mask and jumpsuit, and with a.44 magnum strapped incongruously round his waist, he had spent the better part of the morning creeping through the scrub to inspect each joint and coupling along the pipeline. Now, as he hunched over the pump with wrench and screwdriver, I was surprised to discover that not a single damp spot darkened the khaki jumpsuit. I was marveling over this revelation— he doesn’t even sweat , I thought in amazement — when he stood, brushed the knees of his pants and jerked the starter cord.

Our cheers were drowned in the roar of the engine, which was at least six decibels louder than the one we’d abandoned outside the cabin. The beers popped soundlessly, blue-black coils of exhaust clutched at us before twisting off to darken the sky, the engine screamed its animate agony. Phil looked unhappy, Gesh gritted his teeth. If Vogelsang was disturbed, he gave no sign of it — he merely stood there, arms akimbo, staring down at the thing as if he were contemplating a painting in a gallery. Aorta never even turned her head. In shorts and halter top, she perched on a rock in midstream and serenely tapped her foot to a private rhythm, her ability to register auditory shock evidently impaired through her association with the Nostrils. Rat-a-rap-rap , screamed the engine, rap-rap-rap. Gesh bellowed something in my ear, but it was lost in the machine-gun rattle of the engine; I concentrated on swallowing without choking on my tongue. After five minutes or so, Vogelsang shut the thing down, then lifted his surgeon’s mask and turned to us. “You’ll have to dig a pit.”