T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

He chatted. Came on strong, made a stab at wit (Petra didn’t elaborate, but I could guess what passed for wit in Jerpbak’s circle — adolescent double entendre gleaned from sitcoms and game shows). Petra didn’t respond. “Can I go now?” she asked finally.

Jerpbak again held her eyes, Jerpbak the hound, the married man, the former star halfback, and lowered his voice to a seductive whisper: “Only if you’ll let me take you to dinner some night this week.”

Three days later he appeared in her shop. “Hi,” he said, dressed in civvies that looked like a uniform — white pants, polo shirt, the inevitable shades. “Remember me?” She again rebuffed him, and he stormed out of the shop like a wounded buffalo; thereafter, Petra was prominent on his shitlist. In due course he discovered that in addition to making mugs, saucers, plates, cream and sugar dispensers, flower pots, bowls and pickle trays, she also made stoneware bongs for a head shop in San Francisco. This gave him a foothold, an angle, a justification for putting pressure on her. She was now, in his view, a blot on the community, an undesirable engaged in an activity if not actually illegal, then certainly reprehensible and corrupting.

Shortly thereafter he stopped her as she was driving off to an arts and crafts fair, her Volkswagen laden with bulky frangible pieces, and conducted a search of the car while writing out a sheaf of violations. He asked her if she wasn’t aware that narcotics implements such as she produced were commonly used by minors. He asked her if she had no sense of morals or community responsibility. Finally, after she’d been delayed over half an hour and was exasperated to the point of tears, he offered to tear up the tickets if she’d agree to go out with him just once. She refused. “All right,” he said, sunglasses snapped down to shield his face as if he were preparing for battle, “but you’re going to regret it.”

From across the cell, the shoplifter’s voice twitched with the modulations of the hormonal imbalance. “Shoplifting,” he said.

“Me,” the Indian said, “I’m in here for nothing. Breathing, that’s all. I’m in here because I don’t own a Lincoln Continental.”

There were footsteps in the hallway, I heard the clank of a metal door and then a voice calling out my name. I jumped up. The big medieval key rattled in the lock. “Nasmyth,” the voice repeated. “Come with me.”

Phil was waiting for me in the anteroom. He clutched a bulging business envelope in one hand and he was grinning sheepishly, as if he were the one who should be apologizing. The office was small and cramped; the night-shift cop sat at his desk shuffling papers and looking worn and weary. Phil embraced me in the traditional back-slapping way, then counted out twenty crisp one-hundred-dollar bills for the man at the desk, folded the receipt away in his wallet, and led me out the door. “You all right?” he said.

I mumbled a reply, hangdog, mortified, not knowing what to say. Gone were the visions, fled the dreams. I felt I’d let everyone down, felt that I alone had stuck the pin in our balloon and destroyed what nosy neighbors, hostile townsfolk, anarchic bears and inclement weather couldn’t. How could we go on now? I’d attracted the notice and aroused the enmity of Jerpbak. The summer camp was dead.

We climbed into the Toyota in silence. Phil drove. He insisted on it, in fact, treating me like an invalid, as if the six hours I’d spent behind bars had so sapped me I was unable to depress the pedals or manipulate the shift lever. He left the police station headed in the wrong direction, made several stops — for cigarettes, for gas, for an It’s It — pulled in and out of driveways, looped back on himself, and finally emerged from an obscure dirt road just opposite Shirelle’s Bum Steer. For a long while we merely sat there, the engine idling raggedly, as he studied the blacktop and peered into the rearview mirror with the intensity of a U-boat captain lining up a target on his periscope. Then, without warning, he hit the accelerator and the Toyota leapt out onto the roadway like a drag racer. Phil glanced at me in the rushing darkness. “Evasive action,” he explained.

It was the first thing either of us had said since we’d left the police station. We’d been lost in our own thoughts, measuring out the sentence of doom, trying to accommodate ourselves to disappointment and failure. “So how’s Vogelsang taking it?” I said.

I studied Phil’s profile in the glow of the dashboard. It was unrevealing. He was all nose, chin and Adam’s apple, like a caricature. I thought at first he might be suppressing a grin, but I couldn’t be sure — he might have been frowning, too. Just then the tires squealed, we lurched around a corner and slowed as we hit the pitted surface of the road up to the summer camp. Phil shrugged. “He’s up there now, waiting for you. Everybody’s in a panic.”

“Look,” I began, and the weight of what I was about to say nearly choked me, “maybe I ought to quit the project. I mean, get out of everybody’s way. You guys don’t really need me now that the heavy stuff’s over with.”

The car shivered on its worn springs, bushes scraped at the side panels with the rasp of knives on a whetstone. “You don’t have to do that,” Phil said, his voice soft. He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “We’ll work something out.”

It was two a.m. We rumbled into the field in front of the house and jerked to a halt beside Vogelsang’s Saab. It was a moonless night, stars high and cold like pinpricks in the fabric of the universe. There was the usual chorus of nocturnal insects, the uncertain hump of Dowst’s van and the shadowy displacement of space that indicated the pickup and Jeep. I glanced up and saw that all the windows of the cabin were aglow.

I’d been gone a little over sixty hours. Gesh and I had clambered into the car on Friday like escapees from the chain gang, like troupers boarding the bus for home after a tour of Piscagoula, Little Rock and Des Moines. Now it was Monday morning, and I was back. For months I’d been desperate to leave the place, ticking off the days like a prisoner in solitary, looking up from shovel or come-along and seeing cement, brick and asphalt, lying in my sweaty sheets and dreaming of cold beers, hot showers, checkered tablecloths and discerning waiters; but now, as Phil and I mounted the steps of the porch, I felt I’d come home. It was odd. In a moment we would push through the door to dirt, heat, chaos, to the feeble glow of Coleman lanterns and the scuff of lizards on the wall — and it would be all right. Suddenly I was crushed with regret. I was going to have to face them all — Vogelsang, Dowst, Aorta, Gesh, Phil, my co-workers and comrades — and tell them I was going to quit. Walk out with nothing. Sacrifice myself for the good of all. I didn’t know what I’d do if they took me up on it.

The door swung open and four faces turned to look up at me as if I were a specimen in the zoo. There was a stink of rancid garbage, insects batted at the Coleman lanterns, shadows clung to the corners. My business partners were seated at the kitchen table, ranged round the Monopoly board, beleaguered by coffee cups, an empty rum bottle, brightly colored cards, the spurious lucre of the game’s treasury. They looked anxious. And tired. I couldn’t help noticing that Vogelsang held the deeds to half a dozen properties, had accumulated a mountain of cash and erected hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. Gesh picked up a Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go card as we stepped in the door.

“Felix,” somebody said, and then they were all on their feet, nosing around me like hounds worrying the carcass of a rabbit. All except Vogelsang, that is. He sat there stoically, his features inscrutable, thumbing through his play money like Joe Stalin examining photographs of disloyal party chiefs. Though it was the middle of the night, and he had no intention of stepping out the door or coming into contact with any form of vegetative life, let alone poison oak, he was nonetheless wearing his NASA jumpsuit. I tried not to look at him.