T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

There was a long silence. Jerpbak’s glasses were like the eyes of a predacious insect, huge, soulless, unfathomable. Drums thundered in my head, my chest was exploding, a truck shot by with a climactic whoosh. “I don’t like you,” Jerpbak said finally. “I don’t like your shirt or your shoes or your haircut or the tone of your voice. In fact, I like you so little that if you’re not in that piece-of-shit Toyota and out of here in thirty seconds flat, I am going to run your ass in. Don’t tempt me.” Then he turned his back: I was dismissed.

Jerpbak was hovering over Petra’s window now. She stared straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. “License and registration,” Jerpbak said. She didn’t move. He repeated himself.

Petra’s voice was soft. “Don’t do this,” she said.

“License and registration.”

“All right,” she said. “I forgot my license. It’s at home somewhere.”

I watched the back of Jerpbak’s head, studied the square of his shoulders. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take you in then,” he said. Take her in? I was stunned. The man’s psychotic, I thought. A bullyboy. A brownshirt.

“Shit!” Petra shouted, flinging herself from the car. “You know goddamn well I have a license — you’ve harassed me enough over it, haven’t you? How many tickets have you given me in the last three months? Huh? What do you mean I don’t have a license?” She was six inches from him, veins standing out in her neck, eyes throwing punches.

Jerpbak never flinched. He just stood there, erect as a ramrod, idly fingering the buffed leather of his holster and the hard plastic grip of his revolver. His voice was almost weary. “Up against the car,” he said.

She hesitated; he grabbed for her arm. Just that: he grabbed for her arm, and then spun her around. I don’t know what came over me — some misguided chivalric impulse, I suppose, or perhaps it was even more basic than that, something archetypal, primordial. Kill, fuck, eat , the id tells us, and sometimes we listen. In this instance it was all tied up with sex, of course. Would I have interfered if Petra had looked like Edith Sitwell or Nancy Reagan? I stepped forward. I think I said something penetrating like “Hey, no need to get rough,” and I may have reached out with the hazy notion of restraining Jerpbak’s arm — or no, I merely brushed him, that’s all. Accidentally.

Brushing, restraining — I could have clubbed him with the lug-wrench and it wouldn’t have been any different. One hundred and twenty seconds later I found myself handcuffed to Petra and seated in the rear of the cruiser, my wrist aching, knees cramped, heart hammering, and facing a probable string of charges ranging from interfering with a peace officer in the line of duty to assault, mayhem and attempted murder. The police radio chattered tonelessly, inanely, sun screamed through the windows. I watched as Jerpbak sauntered up to the Toyota and shook Gesh awake. I was as wrought up as a pit bull with blood in his nostrils.

Petra’s free hand reached out to pat my shackled one. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were wide and wet, stricken like the eyes of tear-gas victims. “It’s just that … this guy is crazy. He thinks that I … he, he persecutes me.” She leaned into me, and I could feel her body percolating with hurt and anger until the first sob rose in her throat. A moment later she broke down, sobs churning like waves on a beach, the very frame of the car heaving with the force of her emotion. I’d been thinking wildly of escape, of smashing Jerpbak and running for it, and then more somberly of lawyers and jail cells, the collapse of the summer camp and of how now, finally and irrevocably, I’d let my partners down — thinking of my own circumscribed and miserable self. Now, without thought or hesitation, as instinctively as I would reach out a hand to someone who’d fallen or hold open the door for a child with an armful of groceries, I drew up my free hand to take her shoulder and press her to me. What else could I have done?

I was advised of my rights, photographed, fingerprinted, relieved of my personal property and consigned to the local jail, where I was escorted to a communal cell occupied by two happy-hour drunks, an acne-ravaged shoplifter, a vagrant Indian, and a middle-aged man who had assaulted his seventy-five-year-old mother in a dispute over a can of sugar-free Dr Pepper. I was charged with interfering with the duties of a peace officer and assault and battery. Bail was set at $2,000.

The cell was big, fitted out with Murphy cots, tile floor (easy to hose down, like a cage at the zoo), and two crappers. The Indian — I thought at first he might have been one of the pool players from Shirelle’s — was leaning against the bars, dragging on a cigarette, as I stumbled into the cell. A toothpick jutted from his mouth, and his eyes were like cups of blood. The others sat or lay on their cots in silence, gripped by the peculiar lassitude that sets in when the cell door clanks shut and you find yourself locked away and powerless. After a moment the Indian nodded at me and said, “What they get you for?”

I was feeling stupid, ashamed, guilty. I’d acted impulsively, foolishly, replaying my first encounter with Jerpbak to the letter, déeAjéaG vu. I wanted to hang myself, throttle Jerpbak, make love to Petra, Chinowa, poor dead Annie, I wanted to sit around the table at the summer camp and drink gin rickeys with Phil and Gesh and even Dowst; I did not want to hunker down behind the broomhandle-thick bars of the Willits jail and open up my heart to a vagrant Indian. “Murder,” I said.

The Indian’s lower lip protruded until it entirely obscured the upper, and he nodded his head slowly and solemnly. No one else said a word to me until Phil came to bail me out six hours later.

Six hours. For six hours I lay on my cot and listened to the tortured ratchetting snores of the drunks and the mea culpas of the mother-beater ("Mama,” he moaned at regular intervals, “Mama, forgive me"); for six hours I reflected on my crime and its consequences for the summer camp, and tried to focus the image of Petra, already dissolving in my memory like a teaspoon of sugar in a water tank. There were the distant echoes of footsteps, blown noses, cleared throats. A single yellow bulb burned in the hallway. “What they get you for?” the Indian asked the shoplifter.

In the car on the way in, and while we sat shackled wrist to wrist in the anteroom of the Willits Police Department, Petra had given me an insight into Jerpbak that made my blood boil. Not that I wasn’t already coddling with fear, excitement and rage, my nervous system like a leaky gas jet over which someone was fumbling with a pack of matches, but this was a real provocation, this was heinous: Jerpbak had sexually harassed her. I was outraged and disgusted. He was no ascetic, no true believer — he was venal, an extortionist, an amatorial strong-arm man. He was a sinner like the rest of us.

It seemed that Petra had first run afoul of him shortly after he’d been transferred to the eastern Mendocino region. He’d stopped her for a routine check, stopped her because he was bored, because she was a pretty girl and he was a lean, tough, sinewy, head-cracking, doper-busting, macho highway patrolman. I pictured him — the jackbooted swagger, the short-sleeved shirt with the chevron on the shoulder, the iron triceps and rigid spine — as he ambled up to the car. Petra was ready for him. She held out her license and registration like offerings, like tribute, and concentrated on the nervous chatter of her car’s engine. “What’s this?” he said, stooping to lean in the window and slip back his sunglasses like a knight lifting his visor. “My license and registration,” Petra said, glancing up at him. His hair was fine, parted at the side and cut close in what used to be called a regular haircut; equally fine hairs flattened along his forearm as a truck whooshed by on the highway. “I don’t want to see those,” he said, holding her eyes. “I just want to chat a minute, that’s all.”