T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

But Vogelsang never made mistakes, and now I wasn’t so sure.

I lay there a moment atop my sweaty sleeping bag, a soiled sheet twisted at my ankles, and then staggered into the kitchen for a glass of water. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and the house was already so hot you could have baked bread on the counter. Phil was stretched out on the sofa behind a tattered copy of an E. Rice Burroughs novel, perfectly inert, a tall vodka collins in his hand. I peered through the yellowed window and saw that both van and Saab were gone. “Vogelsang and Dowst leave already?” I said.

Phil snorted. “What do you think — they’d stick around here a second more than they had to?” From above, in the insupportable heat of the loft, Gesh’s snores drifted down, dry as husks.

I drank from the tap, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Last night,” I began, rummaging through the refuse on the counter for a knife, peanut butter and bread, “Vogelsang said we’ve only got a thousand plants in the ground — that’s crazy, isn’t it?”

Phil shrugged. I was watching his face and he was watching mine. “I don’t know, seems like there’s a million when you’re watering.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know what you mean,” but fifteen minutes later I was out there in the feverish hammering heat of midday, notebook in hand, counting.

Bushes had gone brown, the grass was stiff and yellow. I trod carefully, terrified of the rattlesnakes that infested the place. (I had a deep-seated fear of snakes, of their furtiveness, their muscular phallic potency, the quickness of their thrust, and the terrible rending wound they left in the poisoned flesh. I always carried a snakebite kit with me — but of course I knew the rattler would never be so cooperative as to puncture my foot or hand, but instead would fasten onto my ear or eye or scrotum, thus negating the value of the kit — and during the cold weather, when there was no more than a chance in a million of encountering a snake of any kind, I’d worn leather gaiters. As soon as the heat had set in, and the snakes emerged, the gaiters had become too uncomfortable and I’d abandoned them.) I made a mark for every plant on the property, four across and a slash for five, and found that fewer than a thousand had survived the root rot, blight, and over- and under-watering that had afflicted them. Not to mention the hundreds — thousands? — that never emerged from the tough withered husks of their seedpods or succumbed to the depredations of various creatures, from the insects in the greenhouse to the bear. Nine fifty-seven. That was the figure I came up with, and that was the figure I presented to my co-workers after dinner that evening.

The evening watering was done, and we were standing out front of the house in the long shadows, pitching horseshoes for a dollar a game. “Vogelsang was right,” I told them, “we’ve got less than a thousand plants.” It was awful to contemplate: in one fell swoop our profits had been cut in half.

“Bummer,” Gesh said, and pitched a ringer to win the game. “That’s what, thirty-six dollars you owe me now, Felix.”

But this was just the beginning of our troubles, the first clear indication that we would have to revise our expectations downward. There were more to come. A week later, we began to notice that some of our healthiest plants — chest-high already and greener than a bucket of greenback dollars — were wilting. On closer inspection we saw that a narrow band had been cut or gnawed in the stem of each plant. We were bewildered. Had deer leapt eight feet in the air to vault our fences, bend their necks low to the ground, and nibble at the hard fibrous stems of the plants rather than graze the succulent leaves? Obviously not. Something smaller was responsible, some rabbity little bounding thing with an effective range about ankle-high and the ability to crawl under a deer fence. “Rabbits?” Phil guessed. “Gophers?”

It was then, with fear, loathing, regret and trepidation, that I remembered the dark scurrying forms I’d encountered that first day in the storage shed; a second later I made the connection with the rat traps we’d found scattered about Jones’s main growing area. “Rats,” I said.

We phoned Dowst. Rats, he informed us, live in the city. In garbage. A week later we’d lost upward of fifty plants, and we phoned him again. He looked preoccupied as he stepped out of the van, and I noticed that his skin had lost its color, as if he’d been spending a lot of time indoors, hunched over his notes on the virgin’s bower or the beard lichen. We walked down to Jonestown with him, squatted like farmers socializing outside the courthouse, and showed him the ring of toothmarks that had bled a vigorous plant dry in a week’s time. I watched as he ran a finger round the moist indentation and then brought it to his mouth to taste the fluid seeping from the wound. He was silent a moment, then looked up at us and announced that rabbits were decimating our crop. “They’re thirsty,” he explained, “and here you’ve got a standing fountain, seventy percent water.” He rose to his feet and brushed at his trousers. “The only thing to do is peg down the fences so they can’t get in underneath.”

We pegged. Crawled on our hands and knees through the rattlesnake-, scorpion- and tarantula-infested brush, the sweat dripping from our noses, and hammered stakes into the ground, stretching our chicken wire so tight even a beetle couldn’t have crawled under it. It took us a week. Dowst stayed on to supervise, to potter around the growing areas exuding expertise, and even, on occasion, to lend a hand. When we got the whole thing finished — all the fences in all the growing areas nailed down tight — I observed that we were still losing plants to the mystery gnawers, and suggested that the big bundles of twigs and downed branches we regularly came across in the woods and had as a matter of course enclosed within the confines of our now impervious fences were in fact rats’ nests and that rats, not rabbits, were the culprits. Dowst demurred. But two days later, as the plants continued to wither and the toothy girdles to proliferate, he authorized Phil to drive into Santa Rosa and purchase two hundred rat traps at Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply.

By now it was early August, nearly a month since my fateful scrape with the law. We had something like eight hundred and forty six-foot plants — bushes, trees — burgeoning around us. The boredom was crushing. We alternated early watering chores — two days on, one day off — so that each of us could sleep late two days a week. I almost preferred getting up early. At least you felt alive in the cool of the morning, traversing fields damp with dew, ducking through silent groves of oak and madrone, catching a glimpse of deer, fox, bobcat. We’d get back to the cabin at nine-thirty or ten, the temperature already past ninety, stuff something in our mouths and fall face forward on our worn mattresses. It would be one or two by the time we woke to the deadening heat, our nostrils parched, throats dry as dunes, and joined the late sleeper in the continuous round of drinking, pot smoking, cards, and horseshoes that would put us away, dead drunk and disoriented, in the wee hours of the morning.

Each day was the same, without variation. Occasionally the pump would break down and Gesh would take it to a repairman in town and attempt to be casual about what he was doing with twenty-five-hundred gallons of water a day, or Dowst would pay a visit with magazines, newspapers, vodka and ice. But that was about it for excitement. The cards wore thin, the walls developed blisters from the intensity of our stares, we began to know the household lizards by name. “Gollee,” Phil would say, slipping into an Atchafalaya drawl as we sat silently over our fiftieth game of pitch, “I haven’t had this much fun since the hogs ate my baby sister.”