T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I made sympathetic noises. How could anyone — be he deaf, dumb, blind, castrated — walk out on her? I was thinking, and then realized that someone, somewhere, could be thinking the same thing about Ronnie. Square pegs, round holes.

We drank beer. Petra stretched her legs, applied tanning oil to thighs and forearms, offered me potato salad as if it were caviar. It was hot, it was dry, there was too much dust, too much noise and there were too many people, but I hardly noticed — I gave my full attention to Petra, mooning over her like some ridiculous lovelorn swain out of Shakespeare or Lyly, ready to jump up and swoon at the drop of a hat. We drank more beer. Teddy and Sarah fumbled back to the blanket, panting and running sweat, stolidly drained their warm beers and staggered back to the dance floor. Then Petra handed me her empty cup and rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’. Would you get me another beer?”

“Sure,” I said, reckless, foolish, drink-besotted, hurtling mindlessly toward some fateful collision. I sprang up from the blanket. We were standing inches apart. I put my arm around her shoulder and we kissed for the first time, dogs yapping and chords thumping at the periphery of my consciousness, my whole being consumed with pure urgent animal lust. “Be back in a minute,” she said, her voice soft as a touch, and I stood there, empty cup in hand, watching helplessly as she receded into the crowd.

I looked around me. The heifer bacchanal was in full swing, heads, shoulders, torsos and hips flailing in time to the music, feet shuffling and legs kicking, incisors tearing, molars champing, throats gulping — beef, beef, beef — as the smoke rose to the sky and abandoned shrieks cut through the steady pounding din of the drums. To the left of the dancers was the barbecue pit, which I would have to negotiate on my way to the beer booth, and beyond that the appalling dark entrance of the bar.

I began to maneuver my way through the crowd, thinking of Petra’s blue shorts and the couch at the summer camp, when someone set off a string of firecrackers and fifty hats sailed into the air accompanied by a chorus of yips and yahoos. Ducking hats and elbows, clutching the plastic cups in one hand and extending the other to forestall interference, I snaked through the mass of carnivorous bodies at the barbecue pit and was just closing in on my destination when a two-hundred-pound blonde in pigtails and a fringed Dale Evans outfit stepped in front of me and asked if I wanted to dance.

“Dance?” I repeated, stupefied. But before I could go into my hard-of-hearing-with-a-touch-of-brain-damage routine, she jerked my arm like a puppy’s leash, spun me around and propelled me toward the dance floor. This was no time for argument: I danced. She pressed me to her — breasts like armaments, big grinding hips — then made the mistake of releasing my hand as she fell into momentary rapture over the musical miracle of her own rhythmically heaving body, and I dodged behind a barefoot lumberjack with beard, belly and ratchetting beads, and clawed my way to the beer booth.

The bartender had his back to me, bending to crack a fresh keg. “Two beers,” I said. “When you get a chance.” I stole a look over my shoulder to see if my dancing partner had missed me, but there was no sign of her. I was safe. I would give the dance floor a wide berth on the way back, hand Petra her beer and then suggest that we go to my place — or rather her place. Yes, that’s what I’d do. We’d been here long enough, I’d taken foolish risks, and now it was time for my reward.

Absently, I studied the work-hardened hands of the bartender as he positioned the spigot over the cork, screwed the collar tight and rammed the plunger home. Somewhere behind me a raft of firecrackers snapped and stuttered. And then, in the half-conscious way we register minor changes in our environment, I saw that this bartender, with his sun-ravaged neck, graying hair and outsized ears, was not the good-natured cowboy of two and a half hours ago, but someone else altogether, someone who from this angle almost looked … familiar.

Before I could make the connection, Lloyd Sapers spun around, spigot in hand, and said, “Two beers coming up.” The beer was already hissing into the first cup, yellow as bile, when he glanced up and found himself staring into my stricken face. There was a moment of shocked recognition during which his eyes fell back into his head and his lower jaw dropped open to reveal teeth worn to nubs and a lump of shit-colored tobacco, and then his face lit with a sort of malicious joy. “Well, Christ-ass, if it isn’t Ernest Hemingway. Gettin’ a bit dry up there on the mountain, hey?”

My first impulse was to laugh in his face in an explosion of nerves, like the killer at the denouement of a Sherlock Holmes movie ( Ha! You’ve caught me! Ha-Ha! Yes, yes: I did it! I killed her! Choked her with my own hands, I did. Ha! Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha! Ha! ). Fortunately, I was able to stifle that impulse. What I did manage to do, after struggling to get a grip on myself, was force my face into the jocular it-wasn’t-me expression of a good ole boy caught in a minor but quintessentially manly transgression. “You know how it is,” I said, grinning sheepishly, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“Don’t I know it,” he roared and nearly choked on his own laughter. I watched as the level of beer rose in the second cup, already shifting my weight to turn and make my escape, when he leaned forward and said, “You didn’t bring that big fella with you, did you? The one that shoved me around?”

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said, dropping his voice from the usual roar. His straw hat was askew and he smelled as if he’d been dipped in used Kitty Litter. “I don’t like him,” he said confidentially, capping off the beer with a crown of foam. “The man just ain’t neighborly.”

I hooked two fingers over the lips of the plastic cups, preparatory to lifting them from the table and making my exit, but Sapers wouldn’t release them. Held fast, I could only mumble something to the effect that Gesh was sometimes hard to get along with.

“Ha!” Sapers bellowed. “Now that’s an understatement.” And then he snatched the beers from my grasp and swished them in the dust; “You got a couple of chewed-up cups there, friend — what’d you do, pick ’em up off the ground?”

“No, I—”

“Here,” he said, producing clean cups and clicking them down on the table, “I’ll fix you up with some fresh ones,” and I watched as he prolonged my agony by pumping up the keg and meticulously tipping each cup to accept a slow steady stream of headless beer. I was sweating. I closed my eyes a moment and watched a dance of red and green paremecia on the underside of my eyelids. “Here you go,” Sapers said, and pushed the two full beers toward me.

Could it be this easy? I reached for the beers, about to thank him and go, when he ducked his head slyly, spat out a stream of saliva and tobacco juice and said, “So I hear you boys been doin’ a little gardenin’ up there. …”

I stood stock-still, my hands arrested, like a man at a picnic who glances up from his sandwich to find a two-inch hornet circumnavigating his head. Sapers was regarding me steadily, his eyes keen and intent. I remembered that first morning in the cabin, the way he’d dropped the mask of the yokel for just an instant and the foreboding I’d felt. He was clever, he was dangerous, he bore us ill will. And I was half drunk. As nonchalantly as I could, I lifted one of the beers to my lips, took a swallow and said, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Marlon,” he said, blinking innocently, the hick again. “He says you got all these drums of water and hoses and—”