T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

He was indeed. We watched helplessly as he reversed gears, swung right and left, rumbled forward behind a ridge of detritus, cleared culverts, crushed vegetation, leveled and de-rutted the nearly impassable roadway. Gears wheezed, black diesel smoke snatched at the sky. “Hey!” I shouted, but the big polished treads just kept grinding along. Sweat coursed over my body — streams, rivulets, mighty deltas — the sun raked my face and thrust a clawing hand down my throat. Beside me, Vogelsang danced in place, pogo-ing up and down like a Masai tribesman. Though his face was concealed, I took his body language to indicate that he was feeling as disturbed, confused and impotent as I was. A few minutes later Aorta limped up to join us, and after watching the bulldozer churn back and forth a moment longer, we turned as if by accord and strolled over to where Marlon stood in the shade of a twisted oak.

“Hello,” Vogelsang said, peeling back his surgical mask. Marlon’s immediate reaction was to bend awkwardly for the big plastic thermos and cradle it in his arms, as if he was afraid we’d come to snatch it away. He didn’t say a word, merely blinked at us out of pale demented eyes. His head was cropped as closely as Aorta’s, and it seemed disproportionately small against the bulk of him, the head of an ostrich or a sleepy brontosaur. “You know how far up the road your father’s planning to go?” Vogelsang asked.

Marlon looked wildly from Vogelsang’s face to mine, as if we’d asked him to betray his family to the Gestapo or drop his pants and recite poetry, before his eyes finally settled on Aorta. A change suddenly came over his face. He gave her a long, lingering, stupefied look, a look compounded of wonder, greed and unbridled anarchic lust, and then he flushed red and turned away.

“Marlon,” I snapped, striving for that tone of inquisitorial menace and condescension mastered by schoolmarms, drill sergeants and professional torturers, “you’re on private property now, you know — our property — and we want to know just what you think you’re doing here.” Meanwhile, I noticed with mounting panic that Sapers was moving his bulldozer back up the road in the direction from which we’d just come — toward the hill and our burgeoning secret.

Marlon looked down at his feet (they were encased in black sneakers the size of griddles), and then lifted the thermos to his mouth and took a huge slobbering swallow that left his chin streaked with dark liquid and his shirtfront damp. He bobbed his head and his mouth began to work, some terrible trauma pushing itself up from his inner depths to convulse his frame with seismic shudders. “Drinking Coke,” he said finally with a sob. Then he turned his back on us and his great fleshy shoulders began to heave.

All at once there was a hoot of surprise from Sapers and we jerked round to watch him ram the bulldozer into neutral and leap down from the thing in a geyser of water. Even from where we were standing I could see the ruptured plastic pipe, snapped like a twig and flung over the cutting edge of the blade in a sorry inverted V. Water spurted thirty feet into the air — a magic fountain, a gusher, a lid-flipped hydrant on 142nd Street — and suddenly we were running again. Out of breath, crazed, our cards laid out on the table for anyone to read.

As we drew closer I could see that Sapers was clearly bewildered, the Willits Feed cap clutched in one grimy hand while the other scratched at the back of his head. “Lloyd!” Vogelsang shouted, stripping back goggles and hood, and Sapers turned to us with the blank uncomprehending stare of a flood or quake victim. “Lloyd, it’s me, Vogelsang.” Sapers had, of course, been aware of us all along, but had chosen to go about the business at hand rather than bother with social amenities. He had nothing to say to us in any case. Now, though, as I saw the look of enlightenment fan across his features, I realized that he couldn’t have recognized Vogelsang in his jumpsuit. He’d probably mistaken him for an escapee from the burn ward or a commando versed in chemical warfare — just another manifestation of the hostile weirdness we’d brought to his sleepy corner of the woods.

We stood beside him now, Vogelsang grinning, Aorta scowling, the water slashing up into the burnt sky and plummeting down to explode in the dust. I felt like a circus animal — tiger, bear, lion — driven by the whip and making my final approach to the burning hoop. “What in God’s hell is that?” Sapers said finally. He was referring to the plastic pipe, which we’d buried beneath the disused roadway some two weeks earlier. I shrugged. Aorta put her hands on her hips and gave him a why-don’t-you-go-fuck-yourself stare. “Beats me,” Vogelsang said. “Christ, Lloyd, you know I hardly just bought the place — there’s all sorts of surprises here.”

“But, but …” For the first time since I’d had the misfortune of meeting him, Sapers seemed at a loss for words. “But,” he stammered, waving his hand to take in the entire scene, “I been grading this road for twenty years and there’s never been no pipes in here before.”

Vogelsang laughed, a maniacal, wound-up, child-molester’s laugh. “Christ,” he said, repeating himself, as if the invocation of a higher authority could somehow get him off the hook, “I just don’t know how to explain it, Lloyd. It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.” Vogelsang patted frantically at his pockets, searching for the breath neutralizer, which he finally located and used with obvious relief. “I guess we’ll just have to contact the DWP and see what they’ve been doing up here.”

Sapers looked skeptical — he knew as well as I did that the water department had no business out in the hind end of the wilderness, that Vogelsang’s implication was as preposterous and unfounded as if he’d attributed the pipe to Soviet intervention or UFOs. From skepticism, he shifted to suspicion. I could see the change in his face, could see that he was about to say something more, something tougher, something that would poke holes in the entire fabric of lies we’d thrown up to mask our real purpose, when suddenly the gush of water fizzled out. One moment it was spouting like Old Faithful, and the next it was the trickle of a child at a urinal.

“I’ll be damned,” Sapers said.

Vogelsang put on a look of consternation and wonder, a look as phony as mine. The water had given out for a simple and intelligible reason: the pump had shut down. As programmed. We’d gauged the amount of gasoline required to run the pump until all our reservoirs were filled — at that point, the pump ran out of gas and shut itself down. Chuff-chuff, bang. Simple as that.

We were standing around scratching our heads when suddenly a shadow fell across my back, and I swung round to confront a dejected Marlon, the thermos wedged beneath one fleshy arm, his eyes red with weeping. Behind us, the earthmover idled with a subdued chuffing roar, its surfaces glistening with water. Vogelsang had stepped forward to make a show of casually tossing the pipe aside, as if it meant nothing in the world to him — as if, like the rocks and trees and insects, it were just another manifestation of the marvelous in an endlessly puzzling universe — and was assuring Sapers that he’d look into the matter and straighten things out with the DWP or “whoever it was that was responsible.” Marlon began to whimper.

“What’s with you?” Sapers snarled.

The boy pointed a thick accusing finger at me. “He … he yelled at me, pop.”

Sapers gave me a quick withering glance, a glance of contempt, hatred and disgust, then shot his eyes at his son. “Aaah, shut yer face, Fathead.” Then he looked at me again, a wicked little grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “So,” he roared, “how’s the writin’ goin’, Shakespeare?”