T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“Real work?” I echoed. The room was as still and dry as an ancient riverbed; pots uncountable and in every phase of production littered the floor, the makeshift shelves, the drying racks and firing trays. I was puzzled.

She crooked her finger and I followed her — she in jogger’s shorts, her long naked legs leaping from the cutaway smock, me in my least offensive T-shirt and most imbecilic smile — to a doorway at the far end of the room. I’d seen the door earlier and taken it for a closet, but now she flipped a light switch and led me into still another room. Perhaps the blandness of the workroom and my growing preoccupation with lunch had lulled me, but this was a surprise: suddenly I found myself amidst a host of strange figures, colors that pulsed, glazes that dazzled. If the shop was a potter’s paradise, then this was the treasury of the gods. Or no: this was the dwarf kingdom. Bearded, mustachioed, long-eared and thick-browed, fifty faces leered at mine, their expressions crazed, demented, vacant. Human figures, two-thirds scale, stood, sat and crouched round the room, their heads pointed, eyes veiled, lips curled with private smiles or fat with the defective’s pout. It was like being on a subway in Manhattan. I laughed.

Petra seemed relieved. She was grinning. “You like them?”

I was making various marveling noises — tongue clucks, throaty exclamations of wonder, giggles that rose in crescendo to choke off at the top. I stroked the slick, brightly glazed dunce cap of a man perched on the edge of a park bench and reading a newspaper. “Todd Browning,” I said. “Fellini.”

She nodded. “And Viola Frey. And Robert Arneson.”

“And you,” I said.

“And me.”

A trio in buskins and leotards — men? women? — groped for a ball suspended from a string; a child with the drooping features of Leonid Brezhnev played at jacks. “These are great,” I said, unraveling my arm to indicate the full range of them. “They’re hilarious and weird, they’re grotesque. Has anybody seen them?”

Petra was leaning against an enormously fat woman in a bridal gown decorated with dancing fishes. “A few people,” she said, and I felt a surge of exhilaration (she was showing them to me, I was one of the chosen) and a corresponding jolt of jealousy (to whom else had she shown them?). Pots and creamers and orange-juice pitchers were okay, she said after a moment, and she enjoyed doing them — but she was an artist, too, and these pieces were an expression of that side of her. She was collecting them for a show in San Francisco.

I asked her if she knew anything about metal sculpture, and then if she’d ever heard of Phil Cherniske. “He does — he did — these big preposterous things in metal,” I said. “He used to be known as Phil Yonkers?”

She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, looked distracted, but she said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then: “Have you had lunch yet?”

“No,” the word a hurtling shell, my lips the barrel of an artillery gun, “no, I haven’t.”

“Because I was going to close early — now, in fact — and go to a barbecue at this little country bar just outside of town. You know, steak and ribs and whatnot. They’re celebrating national heifer week or something and a friend of mine who runs a health-food store made up some of the salads. I mean, I’m not that much into red meat, but I thought it might be fun.”

“Sure,” I said, marveling at how easy it was. “Sure, sounds like fun.”

She was smiling like all the angels in heaven. “Great,” she said. “Let me just take off this smock and get my purse,” and she started out of the room, only to swing round at the doorway and lean into the post for a moment. “Maybe you know the place? It’s on the Covelo road?”

One of the ceramic pinheads reached out and punched me in the solar plexus but I held on, praying, gasping for breath, feeling the great hot tongs of fate fishing around for me as if I were a lobster in a pot.

“It’s called Shirelle’s.”

The parking lot at Shirelle’s — that barren wasteland, that tundra — was as packed with vehicles as a used-car lot. There were pickups, RVs, Mustangs, Bobcats and Impalas, choppers, dirt-bikes and Mopeds, Trans Ams and Sevilles, woodies, dune buggies, vans — and the monolithic cherry-red cab of a Peterbilt truck, a machine among toys, rising like an island from the sea of steel and chrome. Beyond the cars I could make out cowboy hats and tiny sun-flamed faces and the metronomic dip and rise of the head of a grazing horse. I recognized the scene. Bingo under the trees, the church picnic, county fair. Children ran squalling through a blue-black haze of barbecue smoke, dogs yelped, Frisbees hung in the air. Over it all came the inevitable twanging thump of amplified country music— Duckett, duckett, duck-etttt/Duck, duck, duck-etttt —and the hoots and yahoos of inebriated giants in big-brimmed straw hats. I swung into the lot with a crunch of gravel and found a parking spot between two glistening, high-riding pickups. “Well,” I said, turning to Petra, “this is it, huh?”

She was leaning forward in her seat, legs long and naked and brown, scanning the lot with the intensity of a child at the fair. “There’s Sarah’s car,” she said, “and that’s Teddy’s motorcycle.” She shot a look past me. “And good, good. Alice is here, too.” Her hand was on my arm, light as a breath of air, heavy as a shackle. “I think you’re really going to like them.”

Odd, I thought, emerging from the car, that I’d barely noticed all this on my way into town an hour and a half ago. (I’d been aware of an unusual level of activity — cars swinging in and out of the lot, music blaring — but had been afraid to look too closely for fear I’d find myself staring into Savoy’s face, or Shirelle’s or Sapers’s or George Pete Turner’s.) Odder still that we’d taken my car — the interdicted Toyota — but I’d felt, for reasons that have to do with the masculine ego and the need to assert it, that I should be in command. Despite the fact that Petra had offered to drive and that the very sight of the Toyota was a provocation to every law enforcement officer within a thirty-mile radius.

I slammed my door. Petra slammed hers. I stood there a moment in the hellish sun, the smell of burning meat in my nostrils, and felt as naked and exposed as a sinner at the gates of Dis. Twice before I’d trod this very ground, and twice before I’d found myself in deep trouble. The place was a sink of enmity, a nest of yahooism, as fraught with danger as the Willits police station. (Quick clips of the leering faces of Sapers, Marlon, Shirelle, Savoy and Jerpbak passed in review through the contracting lens of my consciousness.) Good God. I’d gone back on my word, left the farm wide open to discovery and paraded my car about the streets, and now here I was, strolling blithely into the lion’s den as if I had nothing to fear. What am I doing? I thought, suddenly seized with panic. Couldn’t I control my urges, get a grip on myself, act like an adult? Of course I could, yes, of course. It wasn’t too late. I’d tell Petra that I didn’t feel well, that I hated fairs, country music, sunshine, that my parents had been missionaries roasted by cannibals and that the smell of the barbecue pit turned my stomach. But then she took my hand to lead me forward, and something rose up in me that had neither regard for danger nor respect for fear, and I felt nothing but bliss.

Admission, FOR ALL THE MEAT, BEER AND SALLID YOU CAN HOLD, was six dollars, and we stood in front of a card table manned by a rapier-nosed, watery-eyed old fellow in a plaid shirt while Petra dug through her purse and I examined the contents of my pockets. I had about fourteen or fifteen dollars to last me the rest of my life, but for the same reason I’d insisted on driving, I attempted to pay for both of us. I came up with two fives and two singles that were so worn they looked like leaf mulch, and laid them on the table, but Petra wouldn’t hear of it. “No way,” she said, scooping up the bills and forcing them into my front pocket. “I invited you, remember?”