T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Everything was as I’d left it — the tumbledown shack with its cloudy windows and peeling tarpaper, the gutted outbuildings, mounds of garbage. The Jeep sagged forward on its bad spring, the open hood testimony to my frustrated efforts to start it. It was six-thirty. The sun hung over the cabin as if stalled, a hushed expectant stillness in the air. Dowst wasn’t back yet.

I felt a hundred years old. My clothes were sweat-soaked, my mouth tasted of bile. I’d left the plantation for six hours and the wrath of the gods had fallen on my head. There was no doubt about it, I thought, trudging across the moribund field to the house, Savoy meant to blackmail us. And I’d have to tell them. Tell Phil and Gesh, my partners and fellow sufferers, my buddies. Tell Dowst. Tell Vogelsang. Tell them I’d gone back on my word, tell them I’d fucked up. I stepped up on the porch, scattering lizards, and the tiniest hope flared in my scored brain: Vogelsang. Maybe he could sound her out, buy her off, kidnap her and ship her to Bolivia in a crate of machine parts. Anything was possible. After all, he was used to working miracles — and he never lost. Never. Not to anyone.

The door pushed open with its usual whine of protest — bed, I was thinking, an hour’s sleep, that’s all I’ll need and then I can sort things out — when I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and turned to see a figure seated on the couch. It wasn’t Dowst, it wasn’t Vogelsang, it wasn’t Phil or Gesh or Aorta. I stood there frozen in the doorway, stupefied, blinking at the gloom. I saw ankle boots, skinny tie, short hair brushed straight up and back.

“Hello, Felix,” Jones said.

I heard the minutest sounds: the drip of the bathroom faucet, the rattle of a fly trapped against the windowpane. Tap-tap, tap. The fly threw the husk of its body against the glass — blindly, uselessly — until the rasp of those cellophane wings became unbearable. For an instant, as if in a dream, the objects of the room lost definition (shadows and shapes, shapes and shadows) and then materialized again. I saw a bag of garbage spilled beneath the stove, cobwebs, dirt, a deck of worn cards on the kitchen table, I saw Jones. The moment was timeless, eternal. Tap-tap, tap. Jones made no move to rise from the couch. Finally, the seconds swelling like blisters, he attempted a smile, the sort of smile one ten-year-old gives another before shoving him over the back of a crouching conspirator. “Don’t you remember me?” he said.

My first thought was to close the door, trap him so he couldn’t escape. But then what? Strangle him with his tie? Get him in a headlock and wait for reinforcements? Jones. The wonder of it, the perfidy, the wicked baffling collusion of chance and circumstance: he’d known all along. I slammed the door with a savagery that shook the house.

“No need to get upset, brother,” Jones said, dragging on his cigarette. “I just came to talk business, that’s all.”

I measured the room in six long strides and stood over him, hands clenched at my sides. “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. My voice was strained, distant, as harsh and punchy as a drum-roll echoing across an open field.

Jones didn’t flinch. He just looked up at me, cool as an assassin, arms folded and jaw set. I don’t give a shit , his eyes said. About you, the social contract, hard work, sweat, toil, aspiration. … I want , they said.

I wanted, too. I wanted tranquillity, soothing pleasures in every part, an end to fear, madness and the frantic driven wide-eyed rush of the pursued, I wanted my friends to make money and the summer camp to succeed. And though I hadn’t struck anyone in anger since I was thirteen and a kid named Sammy Wolfson told me to get my dirty ass out of his mother’s begonias, I wanted to strike Jones. Right then. Swiftly, savagely, with power and immediacy and all the hammering force of righteousness. I wanted to blast him, flatten him, cripple him, concentrate all my rage and bile in one annihilating, bone-crushing blow and lay him to waste. I’d had it. I looked at Jones and knew I could kill.

If he could read my thoughts, Jones gave no indication of it. He crossed his legs as casually as if he were lunching at the finks’ club, and then flicked the ash from his cigarette. On the floor. “All’s I want is ten thou.”

“Get out!” I roared. I was trembling.

Jones uncoiled himself and cautiously rose from the couch. We were standing two feet apart. “You want to fight?” he said. “I’ll fight you, motherfucker.”

This was it, the project gone to pot, the wolf at the door, violence and criminality. “Get out,” I repeated, senselessly, and my voice dropped with resignation: there were no more words.

“Hit me, man,” Jones said, backing off a pace. “Go on. But I’ll walk straight into the Willits police station and collect a thousand bucks for turning you guys in. You like that?”

I didn’t like anything. I didn’t care. I cocked my fist.

Just then, salvator mundi , there was the sound of a car in the field outside, and Dowst’s van eased into view beyond the window. We watched silently as the van jerked to a halt in a maelstrom of dust and Dowst emerged in shorts and sandals, looking as if he were on his way to a croquet party. Jones exhaled a cloud of smoke and eased himself down on the arm of the couch. “The other partner, huh?” he sneered. “Let’s let him in on this, too.”

Dowst came through the door with a sack of Santa Rosa plums, two bags of ice and a big-toothed companionable grin. When he spotted Jones slouching there against the arm of the couch like a delinquent outside the principal’s office, he stopped dead a moment, as if afraid he’d entered the wrong house, then continued on in and set his burden down on the kitchen counter. His face had flared briefly — with surprise, passion, outrage — and then fallen in on itself like a white dwarf. Now he stood there at the counter, his mouth puckered in a lower-case o , struggling for some reason to replicate the call of a familiar woodland bird.

“Jones,” I said.

“Jones?”

“The famous dope farmer,” I said. Jones grinned. “He’s here to blackmail us.”

“All’s I want is ten thou,” Jones said, replaying a tape.

I watched comprehension filter into Dowst’s face, and then I watched him get angry (it began with his ears, which flushed the color of spiracha chilis, as if they’d been tweaked, and then seeped into his face, settling in a tight intransigent line across his lips). “We’re busy here,” he said. “We’ve got no time for leeches. As Dowst waxed, I waned. I found that my own anger had dissipated, choked on itself like the mythical beast that swallows its own tail. All I felt now was despair.

Jones ground out his cigarette on the arm of the couch and then adjusted the knot of his tie. “You’re busy,” he mocked. “Well, so am I. So’s the sheriff. He’s busy looking for assholes like you.”

“We know about you,” Dowst said. He was puffed up with self-righteousness now, the Yalie remonstrating over a trick question on a botany quiz. “You were busted last summer.”

Jones shrugged. “Then they’ll know my information is reliable, right?” He pushed himself up from the chair arm and moved past me toward the door. “Look,” he said, pausing at the doorway and glancing from me to Dowst, “I’m not asking, I’m telling you. Ten thousand bucks. Cash. You don’t give it to me, I’ll have a talk with the sheriff.”

The color had gone out of Dowst’s face as the gravity of the situation hit home: we were powerless. We could bait, bluster and threaten all day, we could coddle and cajole, appeal to Jones’s better nature and then pin him down and work over his ribs and groin till he couldn’t stand, but he had us. Short of murder, there was nothing we could do to stop him. Dowst looked sorrowful, penitent, deeply hurt and appalled; he looked as if he’d been punched in the wallet. “But we haven’t got that kind of money,” he said. “It’s all wrapped up in the plants.”