T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

At that moment, my options were suddenly reduced to zero. For the bear, perhaps sensing on some deep instinctual level that he was half a step from eternity, awoke, and poked his huge grizzled snout from the bushes. He was lying on his side, raising his head wearily, like a commuter roused by the first buzz of the alarm clock. For an instant we regarded each other in bewilderment. His great chocolate eyes were striated with red veins, marijuana leaves hung from his drooping jaw, and his odor — the feculent, rancid, working stench of him — enveloped me. I was stunned. Terrified. Entranced.

The bear broke the spell. He rolled to his feet like an old sow shaking up from the dust, a sapling snapped under the weight of him and I fired. BOOM! The report of the gun was loud as a howitzer blast. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! I fired again and again, backing away simultaneously, all my circuits open wide.

I missed.

When the smoke cleared, the bear was standing there precisely as he had been an instant earlier, but now his eyes were seized with intimations of mortality. He gave me one quick dumbfounded look, as if to say “You’re really serious about all this, aren’t you?” and then he was gone.

He took the back fence with him, and cleared a path through the scrub that would have accommodated Clyde Beatty’s elephants. For a long while I could hear him crashing through the brush, and I listened till the sound was absorbed in the hum of the insects and the bored, quotidian chock-chock-chock of the hidden bird.

Even before I could think to set down the sack of German beer, cold cuts and cannolis tucked under my arm, I’d hit every light-switch in the place, flicked on the air conditioner, tuned the TV to some cretinous game show and dropped the stylus on Carmina Burana at killing volume. This was living. I felt like Stanley emerged from the jungle, Zeus hurling thunderbolts; I felt liberated, triumphant, omnipotent. Machines hummed and clicked at my command, breezes blew and trumpets rang out. I was home.

Gesh followed me up the stairs like a page, his arms laden with wine, kaiser rolls, grapes, olives, anchovies, taco chips, Dijon mustard and artichoke hearts. It was two p.m., Friday, the start of the Fourth of July weekend, and we were a hundred and fifty miles from the heat, dust and disrepair of the summer camp. I was overjoyed. Save for a trip to Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply in Santa Rosa, this was the first time I’d left Willits in four months. Four months: I could hardly believe it. The world had gone on, governments rising and falling, economic indicators in a tailspin, people scheming, dying, erecting shopping centers and committing acts of heroism and depravity, and all the while I’d been sitting on my ass in the hinterlands, contracting poison oak and facing down rednecks and bears. But now, now at long last, sacrifice would have its reward: Gesh and I were on a three-day furlough, horny and wild and crotchsore as drovers descending on Abilene.

Phil, who had experienced some measure of relief in Tahoe the previous weekend, had reluctantly agreed to stay behind and tend the plants. “I can handle it,” he said, and then, playing on our fears, “so long as Sapers stays where he belongs and the bear doesn’t come poking around again.” We scarcely heard him. After sixteen weeks of abstinence — sixteen weeks during which we leered at sheep, slavered over farm girls in the two-hundred-pound class and built elaborate fantasies around the whores of Rio — we were strung just as tightly as the horniest zit-faced adolescent. Bears, cops, commandos, insolvency, failure, ignominy and incarceration: none of it mattered. Our eyes were glazed with romance, we were already lifting cocktails in lush gleaming bars full of secretaries, cosmeticians, poetesses and lutanists, the field of our perception narrowed to a single sharp focus. For the present, we had one concern and one concern only: women.

Gesh made the sandwiches while I showered and shaved. Then, while he was anointing himself, I made a few phone calls, hoping to connect with one of the girls I’d dated sporadically over the past year or so. I was disappointed. Amy and Marcia, I learned, had married, and I offered them my feeble congratulations. Giselle was in France, Corinne had joined the army, and Annie was dead. When Annie’s phone didn’t answer, I called her sister, who erupted in sobs at the mention of her name. It was a shock. Annie, declaimer of poetry, danseuse, cat-lover, Annie of the quick smile and athletic legs, had been laid low, cut down by a Coup de Ville as she crossed Market Street on her Moped. All I’d wanted was the fleeting comfort of pressing my flesh to hers — all I’d wanted was love — and instead I’d been given a whiff of the grave. O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,/O Priestess in the vaults of Death …

“Bummer,” Gesh said, flailing his hair with a plastic brush.

I didn’t mean to be insensitive, but I couldn’t have agreed more: it was an inauspicious beginning, and the shock of it dampened my mood as automatically as would the news of an earthquake in Cincinnati or the outbreak of the Third World War. Gesh sat in the corner, a beer between his legs, subdued, watching me. What could I say? It was too bad, a shame and a pity and all that. Still, we were off the farm, and that alone was enough to ignite us again. Before long we were dribbling beer down our chins and bellowing along with Orff. We ate the sandwiches, drank the beer, graduated from Orff to the Stranglers, the Rude Boys and finally the Armageddon Sisters, and then flung ourselves out the door.

Our first stop was the Mexican laundry, where we deposited eight swollen sacks of towels, T-shirts and undershorts in varying stages of fermentation and stained with paint, grease, sweat, tomato paste, Rose’s Lime Juice and the essence of bear. Next we drove up to Ashbury Heights to visit one of Gesh’s acquaintances, a recreational pharmacologist who occupied the dingy servants’ quarters of a twenty-room Edwardian mansion he shared with a lawyer and his wife, a lesbian couple, three Iranian students and an out-of-work carpenter. We passed through an iron gate, ascended marble steps. Gesh knocked.

There was a cacophony of canine yelps and snarls, a scrambling of paw and toenail against the inner door and then the irascible tones of a distant voice: “Coming. Coming.” A moment later, a short angry character with a buzzhead haircut simultaneously swung back the door and kicked savagely at a pair of trembling Gordon setters. “Yeah?” he said, pinning us with a malevolent look.

“Rudy in?” Gesh said.

Without a word, Buzzhead simply turned and walked off into the shadows, leaving the door wide open and the skittish dogs shivering at the doorframe. I followed Gesh, pulling the door shut behind me, the wet noses of the dogs poking at my hands as we passed through a crepuscular entrance hall jagged with furniture — highboys, lowboys, armoires, sideboards. The entrance hall gave onto a drawing room heaped with boxes of clothes and books and smelling of cat litter. “This way,” Gesh said, and we followed a paneled corridor past another disused room, descended a flight of stairs and pushed through a curtain into a small apartment.

There was an odor of onions, tobacco, rubbing alcohol. In the corner, stretched out on a bare mattress and spotlighted in the glow of a tensor lamp, a man with plaited hair held a paperback book to his face. Aside from the mattress, which lay on the floor, and a number of milk crates ranged against the wall and stuffed with books, shoes, clothing and newspapers, the only furniture in the room was a safe the size of a refrigerator. “Hey,” the man said as we entered the room, and then he sprang up from the bed like a predator, snarling, “Get out, get out, you fucking beasts!”