T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

We’d waited for Vogelsang through the endless afternoon, waited as a beleaguered and vastly outnumbered army waits for reinforcements, for the order to withdraw, for the old campaigner who can turn defeat into victory. He’d marched in with a stiff back, strung as tightly as any of us, jumping at the slightest sound, but trying his best to maintain. My confession had given him a chance to take the offensive, but when we’d exhausted that ground and turned back to Jones, he’d begun filibustering. He was selling and we weren’t buying. Confusion, panic and the withering fire of recrimination assailed us, we beat our breasts, shrieked in one another’s faces. Accusations flew, tempers flared. We cursed one another, raged and receded, plotted wildly, imagined untold horrors and parceled out blame.

The biggest parcel was mine. I was blameworthy in everyone’s eyes, my own included. I was incontinent, unreliable, about as trustworthy as a shaggy-legged satyr at a Girl Scout jamboree. Dowst was culpable, as far as Phil, Gesh and I were concerned, for having failed to come up with sufficient seedlings and to plan for a host of contingencies — from root rot to rodents to the birth of Jerpbak — but he was absolved from blame in the current crisis. Vogelsang was unanimously guilty — of duplicity and un-derhandedness, of failing to shield us from harsh eventuality, of having walked into my living room on that rainy winter’s night. There were two innocents among us. Oh, they could have dug more holes or killed more rats, but at this point they were nothing more than aggrieved victims.

Now, the sun dipping behind the ridge and bringing us that much closer to the hour Jones had named, one of those aggrieved innocents spoke up. “Felix says you’re lying, Herb,” Gesh growled, his voice the ominous rumble of some cave-dwelling thing, some bear or wolverine roused from hibernation.

The filibuster had stopped cold. Vogelsang looked tense, shifty, he looked like a perjurer tripped up on the witness stand, he looked like a liar. “I’m not,” he said. “Trust me.” And then he was off again, as if afraid to stop talking, reassuring us, marshalling arguments against our quitting, admitting that things had come to a dangerous pass through my irresponsibility and other factors beyond his control, but reminding us that nothing had happened yet and insisting that he would do his fixer’s best to right the cart. Or something like that. I remember only that he used the orator’s stratagem of exaggerating the adversary’s guilt and opposing it to his own innocence, and that he finished by assuring us that he would ferret out Jones and Savoy and see what he could do. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of them.”

Take care of them? I thought. What was he going to do— buy them off? Cut out their tongues? Run them down in his Saab? Take care of them. He’d promised to take care of us, too.

“Jones,” Gesh repeated. The name was a summons, a challenge, a kick in the face. He was leaning forward now, his fists clenched, his eyes swollen till they looked like cueballs. “You’re lying, Herb. You’re shit-faced with it.”

“Christ, stop bickering,” Dowst snapped, leaping up from the table. “The police could be at the door any minute. I say we harvest what we can and get out now.”

I could see it coming, see it in the way Gesh shifted his weight forward and swung away from the stove, and though I hurled myself out of the armchair, I was half an instant too late. There was a thud as Dowst hit the wall, a muted cry from Aorta and then the wet brutal slap, as of a canoe paddle brought down on the surface of a still lake, as Gesh caught Vogelsang across the cheekbone with six months of rage and frustration. It was a lurching, graceless blow, and Gesh staggered forward under his own momentum, fist, arm, shoulder and chest describing a single arc that brought him and Vogelsang to the floor in a deluge of flesh. The table leapt, the chair splintered. Coffee mugs skipped across the linoleum. Vogelsang was on his back, hugging Gesh in a lover’s embrace, cords standing out in his neck, jaw clamped, eyes feral and frightening. Gesh fought for purchase. “Motherfucker,” he spat, over and over, as if it were a battle cry.

They were scraping across the floor, hugging each other, the shuffle of hands and feet like a chorus of sweeping brooms. Gesh was breathing hard, grunting, cursing; Vogelsang grappled in silence. By now Dowst had recovered from his initial shock and was leaning over the combatants like a referee. “Knock it off!” he shouted, as if it could have the slightest effect. “Come on, break it up!” Feet churned over the floor, the end table went down. Aorta had backed up against the far wall, Phil looked up groggily from the couch. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there, trembling, caught up in the killing violence, watching Gesh hammer at Vogelsang and wanting both to wade in and separate them and to let it go on. Vogelsang was down. The untouchable, the serene, chief god of his own pantheon and victor of every contest he’d ever entered. He was down, and something moved in me with every blow.

It’s hard to say exactly how it happened. Gesh was on his knees, swinging mechanically, Vogelsang struggling to ward off the blows and Dowst leaning forward clumsily to snatch at Gesh’s collar like a teacher in the schoolyard. Then suddenly Vogelsang was free and scrambling to his feet while Dowst hit the wall again and Gesh rose from the floor like a wounded bear. “Gesh!” I shouted, and I understood in that instant that I was cheering him on, goading him, backing him, calling out his name in partisanship and affirmation as the ranks of hometown fans call out the single name of the champion stepping up to bat. For them. For us. Gesh moved forward, huge, the street fighter, the brawler, blood on his knuckles.

I glanced at Vogelsang. His face showed nothing. His right eye was swollen and there was a thread of blood at the corner of his mouth. The.44, swift death, steel in an arena of flesh, clung to his hip. He ignored it. Instead, he cocked his open hands in the kung fu pyramid and stepped forward.

“No!” I shouted.

“Vogelsang!” Dowst called.

It was so quick. So quick I barely saw it. Gesh swung, Vogelsang parried the blow and caught him twice in the throat with the flat of his hand and then struck him in the groin with an exploding foot. As Gesh pitched forward, Vogelsang’s knee went to the small of his back and I could hear the chiropractor’s crack as he jerked Gesh’s head back in the Montagnard death grip. And then, before I could realize what was happening, Phil was up off the couch with the misaligned.22 in his hand and I was flinging up my elbow to deflect his aim — too far, this had gone too far — when we all stopped dead at the sound of Aorta’s voice.

She hadn’t screamed — no, it was far more chilling than that. “Oh, my God,” she said, and it cut like a knife to the core of everything we were — stark, animal, squeal of bushpig, howl of monkey — and we understood somehow that the words had no reference to the silly morality play we were enacting. We looked up — all of us, even Vogelsang, even Gesh. Looked up and saw that there was a face in the kitchen window, framed against the darkening sky. Round and huge, moonlike, a face, watching us.

The fire put things in perspective. It came like a judgment, singeing, cleansing, burning with a pure, fatal, almost mystic candescence, eating away at the old growth of our baited lives to make way for the new. Immediate, deadly, it put us back in touch with ourselves. If we’d sat around the stove on a rainy spring night and traded tales of cheating death, now we fought for our lives. We burned. Inhaled smoke, rubbed our eyes raw. We dropped into the inferno and emerged again. Singed. Cleansed. Alive.