T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

For the first few minutes everyone was solicitous. Gesh poured me a shot of vodka, the only thing we had in the house, Dowst brewed some lukewarm tea, Aorta regarded me with interest, and Vogelsang asked some indirect questions pertaining to the nature of my confinement and how much the law knew about me. I alternately sipped warm vodka and cold tea, my stomach curdling with the bitter culture of guilt and dereliction, while Gesh tried to make sense of things.

Like the others, he was puzzled. What had I done? What was it all about? One minute he’d been snoring against the window frame, and the next he was staring into the whipcrack face of a highway patrolman. The patrolman said nothing, merely pointed to where I sat in the back seat of the cruiser, returned to his car and thundered up the highway. Gesh stared after us, incredulous, then drove to a phone booth and called Vogelsang. Vogelsang asked what had happened, and Gesh was only able to say that I’d been handcuffed to some woman and hauled off by the police. Gesh looked at me for confirmation, elucidation, enlightenment. I looked down at the floor.

Gesh’s voice faltered, then picked up again. Luckily, Vogelsang kept some cash on hand for just such an emergency, and promised to get on the horn to his lawyer and then drive up to Willits with the bail money. Fine. Terrific. Gesh had hung up, feeling relieved, but then found himself at a loss. He didn’t dare go near the police station, for fear he’d be implicated in whatever it was I’d done, and he couldn’t very well sit by the phone booth for the rest of the night. All at once it occurred to him that he should hustle up to the summer camp and alert Phil, in the event that legions of troopers were even then surrounding the place. They weren’t, and he’d had no recourse but to sit tight and soothe his frazzled nerves with alcohol. This he’d apparently succeeded in doing, as he was half drunk at the moment, the words clinging to his lips as if they’d been written out on strips of paper and pasted to the roof of his mouth. When he finished, everyone turned to me. I’d never known a more miserable moment.

“It was really stupid,” I said finally, and the room fell silent. The sound of the moths beating against the lamp screen transferred itself to my head, a frenzied thumping patter of drums. Beyond the windows, something — some creature of the night — let out a short sharp yip of pain or bloodlust. Hesitantly, like a man on the couch trying to reconstruct a dream, I told them what had happened, sparing no detail, and concluded by reasserting that the whole thing had been a foolish mistake, which I heartily regretted. No one said a word. “I feel like I’ve let everybody down,” I said after a moment. “I mean, Jerpbak’s got a vendetta against me now. I don’t see how I can go on.”

Dowst was watching me like a shark moving in on a gutted mackerel. Vogelsang was so alert I thought he was about to snap to attention and salute. Phil and Gesh averted their eyes.

“What I’m saying is, for the sake of the project I think it would be better if I quit.”

“No,” Gesh said. “You can’t do that.”

Phil screwed up his lazy eye and gave me a look of loyalty and camaraderie, a look that said teak tables and marble-topped oyster bars be damned. “I don’t see why you can’t stay on,” he said. “It’s not as though you got busted for a drug offense or anything, and Vogelsang already said his lawyer can postpone the trial till after the harvest. …”

“How much would you want?” Dowst said. “I mean, how would we split?” And then, in a rush: “Because you’d be breaking your contract.”

“That’s up to us, isn’t it?” Gesh shot back. “Me, Phil and Felix are together, remember?”

“Just asking, that’s all.” Dowst tugged at the flange of his long Yankee nose. “But I think he’s right — he ought to quit. For the sake of us all.”

Gesh had been sitting on the kitchen counter, legs dangling. Now he leapt to his feet. “Yeah, and maybe you ought to quit, too. You don’t do jack-shit up here anyway. Maybe you ought to just hump off to Sausalito and write a couple of articles on the chokeberry or something, huh?”

“Wait a minute,” Vogelsang said, pushing himself up from the table, “there’s no reason to get excited. I think there’s a rational solution to all this. You’ve got to remember”—pacing now—“we’ve got a thousand plants in the ground and we need Felix to help water and harvest them. We’re a long way from home yet.”

A thousand plants? What was that all about? Was he saying we had only half what we’d projected? I did some quick figuring, couldn’t help myself: one-third of $250,000 equals $83,333.33. Shit. All this for a lousy eighty-three thousand dollars? It wasn’t worth it. But then another part of me just as quickly grasped at it as if it were untold millions, as if I were a fever-wracked explorer clutching the map to the elephant burial ground in my trembling insatiable hands.

“I don’t see how—“ Dowst began, but Vogelsang cut him off.

“How about this,” Vogelsang said, spinning round to face us like Clarence Darrow delivering his peroration. “Felix stays. But for the next four and a half months,” and he ticked them off on his fingers, “July, August, September, October and the beginning of November, neither he nor the Toyota ever leaves the property.”

They were looking at me appraisingly now, the jury bringing in a guilty verdict. “No time off for good behavior?” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

“It’s up to you, Felix,” Vogelsang said. “I don’t see any other way. It’s going to be tough — you won’t even be able to go into town for groceries or anything. But that’s it. We can’t take the risk.” He was fumbling in his shirt pocket for something, the vial of breath neutralizer, no doubt, found himself frustrated, and then glanced back up at me. “You agree?”

I sat there in my chair like a prisoner in the dock, my face expressionless, a surge of joy and relief rising like a shout in my chest. I’d expected the worst — doom and exile — and I’d merely been sentenced to life at hard labor. Four and a half months of the farm. No Petra, no Chinowa, no fresh bagels or Sunday paper, no music, no films, no leisurely cups of capuccino at coffeehouses in North Beach. Nothing but tedium, dust, lizards and heat. And a chance to make it work.

“Well?” Vogelsang said.

Did I have a choice? I nodded my head. “Agreed.”

Let me tell you about attrition. About dwindling expectations, human error, Mother Nature on the counteroffensive. Let me tell you about days without end, about the oppression of mid-afternoon, about booze and dope, horseshoes, cards, paperbacks read and reread till their covers fall to pieces, let me tell you about boredom and the loss of faith.

First off, Vogelsang was right. There were only a thousand plants in the ground. Or to be more precise, nine hundred fifty-seven. I know: I counted them. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke the day following my sojourn in the town jail. Early on, we’d planted better than one thousand seedlings, and then Dowst had managed to sprout and plant some six or seven hundred more — at least. Or so he’d said. We were aware that we’d fallen short of our original estimate, but we had no idea by how much. Five percent? Ten? Fifteen? It wasn’t our concern. We were the workers, the muscle, the yeomen, and Dowst and Vogelsang were the managers. The number of plants in the ground and the condition of those plants was their business; ours was to dig holes, string and mend fences, repair the irrigation system, and see that each plant got its two and a half gallons of H 2O per day. And so we’d never counted the plants. Never felt a need to. There were so many, after all, forests of them, their odor rank and sweet and overpowering, that we simply let ourselves get caught up in the fantasy of it, the wish that fulfills itself: of course we had two thousand plants.