T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Dowst had found a can of Bon Ton lobster bisque and was applying the opener to it. “Usually about fifty percent. It could be higher or lower. Depending.”

Phil looked like a man being strapped into the electric chair while his wife French-kisses the D.A. in the hallway. “On what?”

The lobster bisque was the color of diarrhea. Dowst sloshed it into his spotless Swiss aluminum camp pot and stirred it with a spoon he’d carefully disinfected over the front burner. “Luck,” he said finally, and he pronounced the word as if it had meaning, pronounced it like the well-washed Yankee optimist he was, a man who could trace his roots back to the redoubtable Dowsts on the Mayflower. Besides, he had his van, a condo in Sausalito and a monthly stipend from his trust fund. He didn’t need luck.

I thought of Mendel’s pea plants, x and y chromosomes, thought of all those hale and hearty many-branching glorious male plants that would be hacked down and burned — fifty percent of the crop in a single swoop and the second such swoop in a month’s time. Numbers invaded my head like an alien force, a little problem in elementary arithmetic: Take 840 pot plants and divide by 2. Divide again, allowing for one-half pound of marketable pot per plant, to solve for the total number of pounds obtained. Multiply this figure by $1600, the going rate per pound. Now divide by 3 to arrive at the dollar value of each share — the financiers, the expert’s and the yeomen’s — and finally divide by 3 again to find the miserable pittance that you yourself will receive after nine months of backbreaking labor, police terror and exile from civilization.

Dowst was whistling. Phil gnawed at the edge of a black plastic checker, expressionless, his eyes vacant. My half million had been reduced to $37,000. Barring seizure, blight, insect depredation and unforeseeable natural disasters, that is. It was a shock. If Jerpbak, ravenous rodents and the “Sinsemilla Strike Force” had driven a stake through my heart, Dowst had just climbed atop the coffin to nail down the lid.

I awoke the following morning to the tortured rasping of the pickup’s starter and the hacking cough of combustion that eventually succeeded it. Bleary, disoriented — what time was it, anyway? Five-thirty? Six? — I rolled out of bed and trundled up the hallway and into the front room, where I stood in my underwear and peered groggily out the window. The pickup sat motionless in the high weeds, a coil of shadowy exhaust winding from the tailpipe as I watched with a vague, unformed curiosity, emerging from dreams as from a lake. Then a dull tooth of light glinted from the pickup’s windshield as the vehicle heaved forward and rocked across the tarnished field, tailgate clanking, stiff grass giving way, birds bitching in the trees: there was the valediction of the brake lights, and it was gone. I stood there a moment longer, perplexed, scratching at my privates, until a voice spoke at me from the gloom of the far corner. “Gesh and Phil,” the voice said.

Dowst, I saw now, was sitting at the kitchen table over a bowl of granola, shaking vitamin tablets into his palm from a forest of plastic vials. A soft, aqueous light suffused the room, pressing like a swollen balloon against the familiar objects of the place, softening corners, spreading shadows.

“What time is it?” I said.

“Five.”

Five. I let that register, still scratching, then allowed my awakening mind to seize on the next question. “Where are they going?”

Dowst sighed. His eyes, pale in the best of light, were rinsed of color in the incipient gray of the morning. “Tahoe,” he said.

“Tahoe?”

“For three days. R and R, they said. Both of them said they couldn’t sleep.”

Little wonder, I thought, after the cheering news of the past few weeks (slash, hack, another integer bites the dust). It was my turn to sigh. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down across from Dowst.

So they were gone. Disheartened, disillusioned, shorn of hope, spirit and animation, heads bowed, tails between their legs, the oyster bar reduced to a burger counter, the yacht to a dinghy. For one disjointed instant I wondered if I’d ever see them again, wondered if they’d decided to bag it, write the whole thing off and go back to the lost world of prawns, Mai Tais and teriyaki. But then, as I considered it, certitude came over me in a rush, and I knew — categorically and beyond the shadow of a doubt — that they would be back. Of course they would. A hundred and sixty thousand, eighty thousand, forty, twenty — what difference did it make? It was all they had. They needed this thing as badly as I did — if it failed, after all the hope and sweat and toil we’d invested in it, then the society itself was bankrupt, the pioneers a fraud, true grit, enterprise and daring as vestigial as adenoids or appendixes. We believed in Ragged Dick, P. T. Barnum, Diamond Jim Brady, in Andrew Carnegie, D. B. Cooper, Jackie Robinson. In the classless society, upward mobility, the law of the jungle. We’d seen all the movies, read all the books. We never doubted that we would make it, that one day we would be the fat cats in the mansion on the hill. Never. Not for a moment. After all, what else was there?

Dowst and I did the morning watering; then I went back to bed. When I woke about noon, bathed in sweat, Dowst was perched on the edge of the couch, his duffel bag packed, leafing through an issue of Fremontia. “Listen,” he said, “I wonder if you could handle the watering by yourself tonight. I’m supposed to meet this friend of mine in the botany department at Berkeley — we’re going to have drinks and dinner in Santa Rosa. It’s really important. I could wind up with a two-year appointment there if things work out.”

I was being deserted for the second time that day. I was hot, disappointed, lonely, restless and beset with vague fears. I shrugged.

“Because I’d really appreciate it,” Dowst said, getting to his feet. “I mean, uh, I’ll probably be back late tonight — no, I’ll definitely be back tonight — so I can help you with the morning watering. And for the next couple of days, too — until those guys get back.”

I nodded wearily, and he was gone. I listened to the smooth rumble of the van’s engine until the sound was swallowed up in the rattle of insects and the harsh glottal complaint of a crow perched outside the door. The house blistered around me. I heard a shingle crack, watched a lizard emerge from a rent in the wall and disappear behind the couch. It was then that it seized me. An idea, a point of perspective, an exhilarating, lubricious, uninhibited foretaste of forbidden fruit. I was alone. I could do anything I wanted — anything — and no one would be the wiser.

But no. I’d given my word. Jerpbak lay in wait for me out there, the Sinsemilla Strike Force was poised to strike. Besides, I couldn’t leave the place unguarded — what if Sapers came nosing around? Or if some hiker or cowboy blundered across our sweet fields of money trees? No, I couldn’t leave the place, I couldn’t.

Thirty seconds later I was in the bedroom, poking through the mound of clothes in the corner and sniffing socks and T-shirts to discover the least offensive. It’s been over a month, I was thinking as I dug the dirt from beneath my nails with the blade of a pocketknife. From somewhere below, the crow let out a long rasping laugh and then flapped past the window like a knot of rags. My twice-brushed teeth gleamed at me in the mirror, my eyes were feverish. I eased down on the edge of the bed and pulled on a pair of white jeans, lamentably stained in the crotch with a blot of red wine but otherwise presentable, and then spit-polished my Dingo boots. Over a month. She wouldn’t even remember me. I held the keys in my hand. Would she?