T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I did. I’d stuffed some bills in my wallet as I left San Francisco — a hundred and sixty dollars or so. Sixty-five and sixty-five was one-thirty, I was thinking as I reached for my wallet. That left me nothing to eat on and an expired Shell card for gas. I asked him what he needed it for.

Phil was rubbing his temples. He looked up at me out of bloodshot eyes and let the air whistle through his teeth. “For Gesh.”

“Who?”

“Gesh. He’s the new roommate. They’ve still got him back there,” indicating the rear of the building, “and I’d have to wait till the bank opens before I could bail him out. Crazy Eddie we’re going to have to take up a collection for.”

Crazy Eddie was the third roommate. He’d been behind the wheel when the road had insidiously narrowed and the triangular sign with the insistent arrow had sprung up in front of the bumper. Crazy Eddie flattened the sign and then took out three or four of the steel posts behind it before the right front wheel of Phil’s Cadillac sheared off and the car spun to a halt. All three of them had been drinking and eating Quaaludes, and their judgment was gone. They pulled themselves out of the car to assess the damage and saw that they had annihilated the guardrail of a narrow bridge somewhere off the main road. Black trees stared down at them. Water hummed under the bridge. Crazy Eddie expressed his regrets to Phil and offered his condolences with regard to the condition of the car. Phil asked him if he knew how to get home. Eddie applied in the affirmative, and they stumbled back into the car. Then he revved the engine and lurched out into the far lane, trailing sparks. The police followed the furrow to Phil’s house, arrested Phil in the act of urinating against a tree, dragged the comatose Gesh from the back seat, and proceeded into the house, where they peeled Crazy Eddie from the girl on the couch and booked him for DWI and leaving the scene of an accident. Bail was fifteen hundred dollars.

“I see what you mean,” I said, referring to Eddie’s dilemma, counted out the sixty-five dollars and watched Phil re-count it for the mute desk sergeant. Ten minutes later Gesh staggered down the pitted hallway, an officer at his side. He was wearing a watch cap, a reindeer sweater and a drooping khaki overcoat the Salvation Army might have rejected.

A roomful of cops, stenographers, fingerprint filers, minor functionaries and shackled suspects watched Phil introduce us. I saw cheekbones cut like slashes, unfocused eyes, a stubble of beard. The overcoat concealed a big man, two hundred pounds or more. There were nicotine stains on his teeth and one of his eyebrows was divided by a white scar. I nodded, made a stab at a smile. Gesh was unsteady. He fell back on one heel, covered himself by grabbing my hand in a bleary soul shake, and murmured, “Aces, man.”

Outside, it was snowing. Dry white pellets sifting down with a hiss. We tramped silently across the white expanse of the parking lot, the wind in our faces, a line of smeared footprints snaking out behind us and climbing the steps of the stationhouse in mute incrimination. Gesh jerked open the door of the Toyota and pitched headlong into the back seat. He was asleep by the time I cleared the snow from the windshield and thumped in beside Phil. My stomach was sour, my head ached. I wondered what in God’s name I was doing in a snowstorm in Lake Tahoe at eight-thirty in the morning.

I glanced at Phil. He was grinning at me, his wandering eye so far out of alignment it could have been orbiting the socket. Then he began to laugh, a braying gasping high-pitched shriek that choked on each breath only to come back all the stronger on the next. I couldn’t help myself. Delirium, hunger, sleep-deprivation: whatever triggered it, suddenly I was laughing along with him. Roaring. Beating the steering wheel, throwing my head back, struggling for control and then looking at Phil and collapsing all over again. This was hilarious — the snow, the parked car, the police — all of it. “Phil,” I gasped, my voice cracking with the absurdity of what I was about to say, “Phil, listen, how would you like”—I broke off, laughter nagging like a cough, the sheer silliness of it—“how would you like to make a quarter of a million dollars?”

She stood at the door, looking through us, incongruous in an apron that featured a pair of chipmunks brandishing oversized carving knives and the slogan Why dontcba come up and see us sometime? Woodwork gleamed behind her, dried flowers threw shadows like teeth against the wall. I smiled. No response. We’d heard the music from the road the instant we stepped out of the car. Now, in the open doorway, it was an assault, loud enough to ionize gases, impair hearing, score the lining of the brain. There was an aggressive smell of cookery, too — garlic sizzling in olive oil — that constricted my throat and poked like a finger at my gut. It was drizzling. Cold. Aorta looked down at her feet, then up at my face and away again. “Hello,” she said.

Phil and Gesh shuffled behind me like a pair of thugs. Somehow, somewhere, Phil had dug up a khaki overcoat identical to Gesh’s — double-breasted, pleated, belted, and encrusted with stainless-steel loops and couplings that flashed like badges — and they were both wearing fishing hats with the brims pulled low. Aorta stepped back, Gesh paused to grind out his cigarette in the upturned palm of a headless mannequin outside the door, and then we were in.

The door closed with a heavy, airtight thump, like the door of a bank vault, and we found ourselves in a narrow hallway crowded with hunting trophies. Teeth, horns, nostrils. More dead flowers. Dumb-staring eyes. Javelinas drew back their lips to expose tusks the color of tobacco, mule deer thrust out their antlers, a wizened black creature I didn’t recognize seemed to be devouring itself in a frozen tumult of tooth and claw. “Well,” I said pointlessly. The music raged, the smell of food tore at our stomachs. I shouted out introductions, my companions ducked their heads distractedly, Aorta stifled a smile — was she naturally fractious or merely shy? — and then turned to lead us down a series of hallways and a flight of stairs to the lower level of the lodge she shared with Vogelsang.

She left us in what had once been the ballroom — big floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of treetops and ocean — and disappeared through a swinging door at the far end of the room. I caught a glimpse of Vogelsang, in chef’s hat and apron, standing over a stove as the door swung back on itself. Phil dropped into the sofa as if he’d been shot, and Gesh strode directly to the amplifier and cut the volume. The silence was thunderous. One minute a desperate ragged voice had been raging in my ears over the amplifed thump of tribal drums, and in the next I could detect the smallest sounds: a spoon rotated in a pot, the hiss of a gas burner. As if in compensation, the cooking smells seemed to intensify, tempering the atmosphere like a mother’s touch.

The room was huge, vaulted like a cathedral, and literally encrusted with the objects of Vogelsang’s collecting mania, as cluttered and baroque as a hall in the Museum of Natural History. Which is not to say that each article didn’t have its precise place or that a single piece was displayed to disadvantage. The Tahitian gill nets were suspended from the ceiling, softening the effect of the open beams, a gleaming espresso machine climbed the wall like an instrument of torture, knives and guns were arranged symmetrically on hooks over the fireplace, the oil paintings — richly framed and fastidiously hung — occupied a nook over a party of mannequins and stuffed badgers in coats and T-shirts grouped round a table in the corner. There was a long dining table in one section of the room, a TV and stereo cubicle in another, a museum display case containing pottery shards and fossilized human bones just to the left of the kitchen door. You could spend a week poking through it all and still have another eight rooms to tour.