T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

We dug. Four feet down in yellowish clay. Sweat flowing, mosquitoes harassing, beer gone sour in our throats. Then we set the pump in the trench, threw a slab of plywood over it and buried the muffler in sand. “That should do it,” Vogelsang said.

As Gesh, Phil and I started up the hill, he turned the engine over again and I thought at first we were under attack, the fulminating blast of machinery so unexpected, so obscene and startling in the quiet of the woods. Phil shouted something to the effect that laboratory rats chewed off their own feet when subjected to loud and unremitting noise, but already the trees had begun to muffle the blare of the pump, taking the edge off it in the way a mute softens a trumpet. We would barely hear it from the house, I realized, but Gesh, who had long since identified Vogelsang as the enemy, wasn’t mollified. “Terrific,” he said, loping up the hill. “That’s about as subtle as the London blitz.”

The second problem was more complicated, human rather than mechanical. The problem was Lloyd Sapers. According to legal agreement, Sapers had access to the central road bisecting our property and plunging down into the valley to the southeast. This was his fire road — his escape route in the event that the primary road was blocked by fire, no mean consideration in an area that grew progressively drier until at the end of the season the hills were as volatile as balls of newsprint soaked in gasoline.

On the morning after we’d broken in the irrigation system, Vogelsang, Aorta and I were gathered around the breakfast table while Phil and Gesh watered the Khyber Pass and Dowst huddled in the greenhouse, trying to perform horticultural miracles with a handful of withered seeds and a bucket of Nutri-Grow. Since his arrival two nights earlier — he’d come, reluctantly, to oversee the completion of the irrigation system — Vogelsang had been jumpy as an air-raid warden. Nervous about everything from poison oak to pot poachers to detection and arrest by the DEA, FBI, IRS and the Willits Sheriff’s Department, he was practically clonic, every facial muscle twitching, fingers drumming the tabletop, legs beating like pistons. In a word, he was wired.

This was understandable. With a forest of eighteen-inch plants in the ground, we were all edgy — they had the goods on us now — but Phil, Gesh and I had come to grips with our fears. Or at least we tried to obliterate them through the abuse of drugs and alcohol and an unwavering commitment to the sustaining visions of Rio, Cajun seafood houses and fat bank accounts. We had no other choice: unlike Vogelsang, we had to live with the threat of exposure day in and day out. For well over a month, for that matter, I’d been living with the knowledge of what Savoy had said to me that night— everybody knows what you guys are doing up there —a festering little secret, hidden close. Before the words had passed her lips I was on my feet, pretending I hadn’t heard her, making apologies. I glanced at my watch, slapped my forehead, shrugged into my jacket and staggered out the door like a hamstrung deer. When I got back to the cabin, the lights were out. Just as well, I thought, inching my way through the darkness to my room, spun round with alcohol, panic and the finality of my decision. I was in this thing to the end: Give me pot, or give me death, I thought, giggling to myself. No teenager with an uplift bra and unsized eyes was going to scare me off it, nor Jerpbak, voodoo calendars or shotguns, either. I could take it, liberated by the pledge I’d made myself, burst from under the pall of the sickness unto death and into the light of faith. But why worry Phil and Gesh?

Now, with Vogelsang twitching across the table and rattling on about Krugerrands, gypsum and Oriental rugs, I couldn’t resist sticking it to him just a bit, as he’d stuck it to me over the issue of the guns. “Oh, by the way,” I said, cutting him off in the middle of a panegyric to Bokharan weavers, “did I tell you a plane came over the other day?”

Vogelsang set down his spoon, shot a glance out the window and then fumbled in his pocket for the vial of breath neutralizer. “Really?” he said, a barely perceptible sob cracking his voice.

“Cessna, I think. One of those little jobs with the sculpted cockpit and the propeller out front?”

He nodded. His features were drawn together, a string bag tightening at the neck, and the veins in his temple began to pulse.

The plane had come roaring over the hill, big as a truck, no more than three hundred feet up. It buzzed the house twice, then circled the property and vanished over the far ridge. When it appeared Phil and I were out in the yard, fully exposed, unloading lengths of PVC pipe from the back of the pickup. First there was the explosion of noise, then the dust and the big swooping shadow, and then Phil was bolting for the house shouting, “Load up the car!” He’d actually tossed two boxes of his priceless mementoes into the back of the Jeep before I could calm him down.

“Probably from that airstrip in Willits,” Vogelsang said. “One of those weekend daredevils.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. But it wasn’t pleasant, that’s for sure. With two thousand holes in the ground this place must look like Swiss cheese from up there.”

Vogelsang rapped the tabletop with the vial of breath sanitizer, then raised it to his mouth for a quick fix, as if vigilance against halitosis were the first step in his plan to subvert detection and subdue the world to his fiduciary advantage. Aorta slouched over an uneaten bowl of Familia, absorbed in a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, her nose ring flaring in a ray of early-morning sunlight. I was about to amplify the story of the Cessna— the eye in the sky , Gesh had called it — when suddenly the cabin began to tremble on its frame and a rumbling burst of sound threw me from my chair.

Earthquake? Lightning bolt? The Russian invasion? The three of us lurched back from the table and rushed to the window, where we watched in stupefaction as an odd little parade passed in review. Sapers, on a huge thundering bulldozer, was steaming along the road adjacent to the house, followed by his son, Marlon, on a flatulent Moped. Intent on the controls and hunched in his filthy coveralls, Sapers never even turned his head; Marlon, his glasses glinting in the sun and big fleshy thighs and rear engulfing the bike as an amoeba might engulf a food particle, looked up, flashed us the peace sign, and then vanished into the trees along with his father.

For an instant we were immobilized, struck dumb with panic and outrage. Then all three of us were out the door in blistering pursuit. “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” I choked as we leapt obstacles in the field and sprinted into the narrow roadway like hurdlers coming on for the tape. I was incensed, mortified, shot through with homicidal rage. What if he blundered off the road and into one of the growing areas? What if he caught sight of Gesh and Phil with the hoses or heard the pump? Vogelsang cursed, a series of truncated, doglike grunts, as he pumped his legs and flailed his goggles like a weapon; Aorta, gritting her teeth, ran neck-and-neck with us for a hundred yards or so before she stumbled and pitched forward into the dirt. We hardly noticed.

Vogelsang and I were nearly at the bottom of the hill, a few hundred yards east of the water pump, when we ran out of breath and slowed to an agitated, stiff-legged walk. Hearts hammering, we hurried along the roadway until we emerged from a stand of laurel to see Sapers up ahead of us, maneuvering the bulldozer as if he were taking evasive action. As we drew closer, we could see Marlon standing in the shade of a tree and drinking something from a thermos, while his father dropped the blade of the bulldozer and began slamming away at the surface of the road. “Oh, Christ,” Vogelsang said, quickening his gait, “he’s grading the road.”