T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“Oh, come on,” she said, tugging my hand as insistently as the big blonde had. “One little drink.”

The flesh is weak, but the mind is weaker. I followed her.

We made our way through the crowd — men in wide-brimmed felt hats, women in print dresses clutching patent-leather purses — to the only unoccupied bar stool in the place. Two women — one middle-aged, the other about thirty — flanked the empty stool like sentinels. They smiled in unison as Savoy led me up to them.

What was going on here? I wondered vaguely, my brain numbed with love for Petra, lust for Savoy, heat, guilt, alcohol and the successive shocks of standing face to face with the handful of people in the world I most wanted to avoid. Why was Savoy, whom I barely knew, taking the trouble of introducing me to anyone? What was in it for her, for me? Was she just a friendly, ingenuous, lovely expansive teenager, or was she a conniving, hardened slut who wanted to lead me to destruction and make me betray my friends? For that matter, what was I doing here? Why wasn’t I in the men’s room, at Petra’s apartment, crouching under the bed at the summer camp?

“This is Felix,” Savoy was saying, “the guy I was telling you about?” Telling them about? The phrase sank talons in my flesh. I saw drinks on the bar — a glass of something clear — the hard foraging eyes of the older woman, the soft inquisitive gaze of the younger. Both women nodded, and I had the queer, lightheaded sensation that the room was moving.

Savoy was watching me. The two women were watching me. I felt like a lion or an elephant at the moment of plunging through the concealed bamboo to the pit below. “This,” Savoy said, indicating the older woman, “is Mrs. Jerpbak, and this,” nodding toward the younger, “is her daughter-in-law, Jeannie.”

At first the names didn’t register. I rarely picked up names on a first introduction, even at the best of times. Mrs. Humpback, Mrs. Runamok: what difference did it make? But then, as the elder woman leaned toward me and mouthed “So what do you do, Felix?” the plugged channels of my brain opened up and the full horror of what was happening came home to me: I was standing amicably in a public place and trading polite chitchat with the wife and mother of my deadliest enemy. Joe McCarthy would as soon have sat down to tea with Ethel Rosenberg and Mao Tse-tung. Even worse, Savoy was obviously intimate with them — no doubt they were old family friends who watched TV and shampooed their dogs together, attended church socials arm-in-arm, observed one another’s birthdays and shared a bottomless revulsion for dope growers, pickpockets and other specimens of urban depravity. This is the guy I was telling you about , Savoy had said. It was all up. We’d been fingered. Ten years, intoned the judge.

If I’d been able to pull myself together in the face of Sapers and George Pete Turner, now I broke down. Totally. Absolutely. Without hope or redemption. I leered down at this woman in the pink pants suit and cement hair (who reminded me disconcertingly of my own mother) and shrieked like a madman: “Ha-Ha! I did it! Yes, yes: I killed her!”

The elder Mrs. Jerpbak’s face shrank until it resembled something you might stumble across in a root cellar. She jerked back in her seat like a whiplash victim and clutched at the neck of her blouse. “Ha, ha, ha!” I crowed, turning on the younger Mrs. Jerpbak with the exultation of the Superman, beyond civility, beyond law, beyond reason. “Killed her with my own hands, I did. And by God, I enjoyed it!”

People began to turn their heads. Savoy dug her fingers into my arm and hissed in my face like some scaly thing prodded with a stick: “We were just talking about the rewards for turning in dope farmers, did you know that? Huh? Did you hear about that?” Her face was twisted and ugly, furious, vituperative, the face of an extortionist.

I didn’t feel well. I snatched the glass of clear liquid from the bar and downed it at a gulp. It was gin. I gave Savoy a sharp savage look — oh, the bitch, the bitch — folded my face up like a deck of cards (the floor heaving and swaying, faces melding in a blur as if glimpsed through the windows of a hurtling train), and then turned and vomited in the elder Mrs. Jerpbak’s lap.

Petra was sitting with Teddy and Sarah when I returned, beer-less, my bladder full and stomach empty, reeking of my own intestinal secrets and flailing through the crowd in a galloping, braying, headlong panic. “Felix,” Petra said, “where have you been?”

I could barely speak, locked in the paranoiac’s delirium, envisioning Jerpbak calling out the National Guard to avenge the assault on his mother, looking at Petra and seeing a horde of keypunchers and savings-and-loan men in fatigues, jaws grim with a spoiled weekend, their shiny new high-laced boots trampling through the scrub outside the cabin. Hounds bayed, helicopters hovered. We know you’re in there, shithead , Jerpbak bellowed through a megaphone, and then his voice faltered and broke: Ma , he bleated, Maaaaa!

“Felix?”

“Listen,” I said, panting, jerking my neck wildly as beefy faces lurched in and out of my field of vision, “listen, I’ve got to take off, I mean something’s come up, it’s, uh, well it’s my mother. Her, she—”

Petra was on her feet. “Are you all right?”

I could think of one thing only: slamming up the road to the summer camp as fast as the Toyota would take me and burying my head in the sleeping bag. “Can you, do you think you could get a ride back to town?”

Teddy and Sarah were standing now, too, their faces pinched with distrust: I was nobody, a stranger, an untouchable. I could have been a Hare Krishna begging change in the airport lobby. Petra’s jaw hardened. “Is this a joke?”

“No, listen, I’m sorry,” I said, already backing away.

“Felix.” There was impatience in her tone, exasperation. But there was something else, too: the hint of a plea.

“I’ll call,” I blurted — gutshot, terrified, stung by bestial urges and the frenzy of the doomed — as I turned to run for the car.

“Don’t bother,” Petra said.

I was running. No time to look back. I ran with all the force of the panic rising in my chest, ran in shock, ran as if the entire Jerpbak clan, Savoy, Sapers and George Pete Turner were chasing me with a pot of tar, ran till my lungs were heaving like a drowning man’s and the burning red door of the Toyota jerked back on its hinges and I plunged the key like a sword into the hot slot of the ignition.

I drove without thinking, fast and hard. Seventy-five, eighty, bad tires keening round the curves, my stomach churning. I hit the dirt road to the summer camp at fifty, slammed over scree, fallen limbs, the rock-hard hump that rose between the ruts like bread in a pan, and careened to a halt in a tangle of poison oak and stinging nettle. I shoved out of the car, fell to my knees and puked till I could feel my digestive tract strung out on a wire from throat to sphincter. My eyes watered, my head ached. I watched indifferently as a glossy black beetle crawled between my fingers and a party of ants discovered the sour eruption in their midst, then rose shakily, relieved the pressure on my bladder and forced myself back into the car. After grinding back and forth a dozen times, I managed to jerk the Toyota from the bushes and out onto the hardpan surface of the road.

It was then that I noticed the other car. An old MG, slung low, the grill like meshed teeth. It was parked on the Covelo road, almost directly across from the entrance to our driveway. I put the car in neutral and backed to the edge of the blacktop for a closer look. The car was in prime condition, newly painted, not a nick on it. There was no one in sight. Where was the driver? Had the car broken down, run out of gas? Or was this some backpacking Sierra Club freak ignoring our posted signs? I sat there a moment, studying the inert vehicle in the rearview mirror, then started up the road for the cabin.