T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

When I stuck my head in the open driver’s window, I saw that the kid was handcuffed to the mesh. He said nothing. I said nothing. I reached in, twisted the ignition key and killed the engine. Then, the keys rattling in my hand like swords, like the fierce, sharp, stabbing edge of righteousness, I cocked my arm and pitched the wheeling clatter of them into the flat black envelope of the night.

The Toyota drove itself. Down the ruptured drive and out onto the dark highway, the nasal blast of the exhaust setting shaded windows atremble, each shove of the gearshift rending the car’s guts anew: I didn’t want to go back to the farm. Not yet. I didn’t want to look into Gesh’s drained and soot-blackened face, didn’t want to contemplate the razed shed, charred stubble, the big greedy bite the passing jaws had taken out of our lives. It was just past five. My conscious mind had shut down, but something deeper, some root calibrator of need, led me into the macadam parking lot outside the Circle K and on up to the dimly glowing phone booth that stood before it like a shrine: I suddenly knew what I was going to do.

I fished through my wallet for the number, relayed the information to the operator in a voice so low she had to ask me to repeat myself, and listened to the suspenseful rhythms of longdistance connection— tap-a-tap-clicketa-click-click-click —as I cupped the receiver in my bandaged hands. It would be eight o’clock in New York.

When at long last the line engaged — with a final, definitive and climactic click — my voice leapt into the void on the other end: “Hello?” I demanded. “Hello?”

I got a recording: the number had been changed. I traced a pattern in the grime of the window as the operator dialed the new number and together we waited for the mice to stop running up and down the line. There was a distant ringing. Three thousand miles away Dwight lifted the receiver.

“Hello, Dwight?” I blurted, barely able to contain myself through the operator’s preliminaries, “it’s me, Felix.” The words came in spate, I couldn’t get them out quickly enough: I was afraid he’d left for work already, was he okay, we’d had an accident. Yes, Phil. In the hospital. Burns. I was all right, yes, just a bit shaken up.

He mumbled something about a weird coincidence. I asked him to read me something, anything, pick a day. How about this date in ’65, I said. I’m upset, I said. Help me. Read me something. Be late for work.

There was something wrong. His voice was strange, and for an instant I thought I’d somehow got the wrong number. “Dwight?” I said.

“It’s a weird coincidence.” He was repeating himself. “I mean that you guys …”

I couldn’t hear him. He was speaking so softly I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “Dwight,” I shouted, “I can’t hear you. What’s the matter?”

“The fire,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But we’re all right. We made it. I’m picking up Phil tomorrow.”

“No,” he said.

“Read me something.”

“I can’t. I’m talking about my fire, in the apartment. My old apartment.”

It was then that I began to understand, then that I slipped out of myself for a moment, then that I shut up and listened. Dwight’s building had gone up while he was at work. Two weeks ago. He’d lost everything, every record he’d ever kept, every note, every figure, every last fragment of the past. It was as if he’d never lived. “I can’t believe it,” I said.

“Believe it.” His voice was choked. bewildered. “I’ve been trying to remember,” he said. “For two weeks I haven’t been in to work — all I’m doing is trying to reconstruct it all, trying to get something down on paper anyway.”

I looked out at the night through the streaked grid of the booth’s window— Al & Jolene, Suck This, Go Wolverines —and saw the nodding head of the all-night clerk in the frantically lit quick-stop store. Open all night. Got everything you want. Milk, razor blades, whiskey, Kaopectate. It was a clean, well-lighted place.

“Remember Mrs. Gold? Third grade? It was me, Bobbie Bartro and Linda Lurlee in the far row up against the map of the Fertile Crescent, remember? And you sat where — two rows over, right? Behind Wayne Moore. But what I can’t remember is where Phil sat … or the name of the girl with the braids and buck teeth — Nancy something — that moved away in the fifth grade.”

His voice was a plaint, a drone, remembrance of things past and funeral oration wrapped in one: I didn’t want to hear it. “Dwight,” I said. “Dwight.”

“I’m getting senile. Really, I mean it. Like that game in Little League when we were twelve — we were the Condors, remember? We were playing the Crows, or was it the Orioles? Anyway, Murray Praeger got knocked unconscious in a rundown with somebody, remember? I can get that much. But it’s incredible. I’m really losing my grip: I can’t remember whether we won or lost—”

“Dwight,” I said. And then I hung up.

I felt as if someone had taken a vegetable peeler to my nerves. Hands wrapped in gauze, face smudged, clothes in a bum’s disarray, I stood there in the phone booth like a postulant, staring at the inert receiver as if I expected it to come alive, as if I somehow expected Dwight to call back and tell me he’d only been joking. After a while a pickup truck wheeled into the lot and two men in long-billed caps and coveralls emerged and ambled into the store, where the somnolent clerk served them coffee in paper cups. It wasn’t getting any earlier.

I fell into the Toyota like a dead man, animated the engine, flicked on the lights. Exhaust rose through the floorboards, the truncated tailpipe rattled furiously against the rear bumper. Three pale faces stared out at me from the blazing sanctuary of the quick-stop store as I backed around, slammed the car into gear and shot out onto the highway with a squalling blast. Suddenly I felt crazy, fey, psychopathic. Come and get me, Jerpbak, I thought, popping the clutch and fishtailing up the road. I got it up to seventy by the time I reached the town limits, then swung around and roared through the sleepy hamlet again. I was baiting the Fates, measuring the gape of the jaws. Nothing happened.

I found after a while that I’d somehow turned off the main drag, negotiated a tricky series of cross streets and emerged on the broad, tree-lined corridor of Oak Street. Now I was creeping, the exhaust a muted rumble. My hands were on the wheel, my foot on the accelerator, but the car rolled forward under its own volition, no arguing with destiny. Houses drifted past, white shutters, picket fences, shade trees, then a block of storefronts. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. Red-veined and sorrowful, the eyes fell back into my skull like open sores. I swiped at a black smear on my nose, tried to pat my hair in place. The headlights were tentacles pulling me along.

The shop was dark. I found the stairway out back. White railing, ghostly. Potted plants, leaves black and smooth to the touch, lovesick cat off in the bushes, smell of rosemary or basil. I stumbled on the first step, floundering in the darkness like a dog-paddler gone off the deep end; something crashed to the ground with a sick thump. I kept going. I didn’t think, didn’t want to think.

A moment later I stood on the second-floor landing, breathing hard and peering off into the abyss below. More plants. I turned to the door, knuckles poised, not thinking, not thinking, and made sudden cranial contact with what must have been a bowling ball suspended at eye level. It hit me once, hard, just above the bridge of the nose, then swung off into space to come back and crack me again, this time on the crown of my bowed head. All at once I felt desperate. I’d meant to knock deferentially — it was past five in the morning, after all — or at least wittily, but I found myself hammering at the door like the Gestapo. Boom, boom, boom.