T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“You are all right, though, aren’t you?” I said. His right arm was taped and bound, his chest, back, shoulders; where a tongue of flesh protruded from beneath the gauze, it was rough and raw, as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it.

Phil shrugged. “I’ve got to change the bandages once a day and rub this shit that looks like green toothpaste …” He broke off in mid-sentence. A look of bewilderment had come over his face, and he was gazing beyond me at Petra as if she were a cross between La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Dragon Lady.

I turned and slipped my arm round her waist. “Phil,” I said, “this is Petra. Petra, Phil.”

Phil shook her hand numbly.

“Who the hell are you?” bawled the old man in the wheelchair, glaring at the wide-faced chewing woman. She’d been sitting there, motionless, staring off into space and absently turning the banana peel over in her hands as if she were molding clay. “You,” the old man raged. “Fat face. What the shit, piss and fuck do you think you’re doing in my bathroom?”

The woman looked alarmed, terrified, as if she’d been denounced in a purge and was facing a howling mob. She rose to her feet, gathering up a handbag the size of a pig’s head and looking wildly around her, as we moved off down the hallway, away from the commotion. Phil was giving me an are-you-crazy-or-what look, the look of a conspirator betrayed, a look of disbelief and mortal offense. I ignored him.

We passed through the double doors and out into the sunshine. I was holding Petra’s hand, couldn’t seem to stop touching her in fact. I’d never in my life felt better. “I told her everything, Phil,” I said.

He stopped short. Petra attempted an awkward grin; I put on my sober, prisoner-in-the-dock expression. We stood there in the driveway for a long moment, the three of us, facing one another like footballers in a huddle. I watched as Phil absorbed the news, watched as his lips and eyes tried out one expression after another, sorting through responses like ties on a rack — he looked like a stand-up comic trying to play Lear, Cordelia and the Fool simultaneously. Finally he just dropped his shoulders and gave us a bald-headed, green-gowned, wild-eyed, gap-toothed smile. “At least you didn’t tell the Eyewitness News Team … or did you?”

The caféeA Petra chose for breakfast/lunch was, of course, the very one in which I’d had my first paranoid episode, the one in which I’d conjured the specter of Jerpbak and gone into ataxic shock while Phil blithely related the adventures of Bors Borka, inter-galactic hero. That was back in April. I hadn’t been near the place since. Now, as I swung the Toyota into the parking lot and nosed up to the cinder-block foundation between the inevitable pickups and dusty Ford sedans, I felt the slightest tremor run through my digestive tract. Phil was rattling on about hospital food, oblivious as usual. “They gave me lime Jell-O for breakfast, with a little shit-smear of that fake whipped cream — you know, that stuff they make out of leftover fiberglass? For lunch it was grape Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it. I mean that was it. No bread, no milk, no meat, eggs, nothing. Jell-O.” He scratched the bristle of his head. “Maybe it’s some kind of new miracle food or something.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Petra said. “It prevents cancer.”

We were laughing as we ascended the front steps, grinning like fools as we stepped through the door. The place was crowded. Puffs of starched hair, cowboy hats, cigarette smoke, a rumbling clatter of cheap silverware and busy voices and the faint, countrified pulse of the jukebox. Petra was leading us past a row of congested booths to a table by the far window, when a hand reached out to grab my wrist.

I stopped. Looked down. Lloyd Sapers was grinning up at me, a plate of runny eggs and grits at his elbow. Beside him, the massive spill of goggle-eyed Marlon, an avalanche of flesh in a T-shirt the size of a bedspread. Sitting across from him, and eyeing me wrathfully, was George Pete Turner. “Howdedo, howdedo,” Sapers was saying, the chin bobbing up and down on his neck like a rubber ball attached to a paddle. “Looks like you boys mighta had a little accident, huh?”

Phil and Petra had stopped, too, and were looking back at me questioningly. How many times had I been through this, I wondered, watching the mock-innocent expression hang on Sapers’s face like a kite in the wind, how many times had I played the whipping boy to this crew of in-bred, shit-shoveling, tobacco-chewing rednecks? Things had changed. I’d been through the fire and my life was something new. I jerked my hand away. “What’s it to you?” I said.

“Just asking, that’s all,” Sapers roared as if addressing the entire restaurant. A sly smirk creased the stubble of his cheeks and he licked his lips. “Just being neighborly.”

“You want to be neighborly,” I said, leaning forward and resting my bandaged fists on the edge of the table, “why don’t you come up with some cash to cover your son’s rampage a month and a half ago? Like you promised.”

He was glib, Sapers, chameleonlike, but I had him. His face folded like a lawn chair and he began to fidget in his seat. Marlon, who’d been lustily attacking a double Super Chili Beef Burger in a sea of French fries, reddened and stared down at his plate.

“Come on, Felix,” Phil said. He was standing behind me, the hospital gown tucked into his jeans, impatience hardening his face: he didn’t like Sapers any more than I did.

Sapers was on the defensive now, mumbling something about an operation for Trudy and a stud bull with the bloody scours. I cut him off. “You owe me,” I said.

Through all this, George Pete Turner had been glowering up at me with his wicked slanted vigilante’s eyes, no doubt privately implicating me in the disappearance of his daughter-in-law-to-be and a thousand other crimes, not the least of which was my insistence on continuing to draw breath and occupy space. Now I turned to him, straightened up and folded my arms across my chest. I felt like Shane unleashed, like Kid Lightning, hands wrapped, warming up for the main event. “And you, friend,” I said, “don’t I owe you something?”

The question seemed to take him by surprise. He glanced at Phil and then Petra, as if for clarification.

I was a firefighter, a hero, a lover. I looked him in the eye, two feet away, and prodded him: “Like a good shot to the side of the head, maybe?”

“Hey-hey,” Sapers said, roaring again. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”

George Pete was rangy, tough, hard as a knot. He was wearing a plaid shirt, a hand-tooled belt and a string tie. His eyes were the color of water vapor. He didn’t say a word.

“Come on, stand up,” I said. “I’ll take you on right here and now, bandages and all.” I don’t know what had come over me, but I was suddenly hot with outrage, self-righteous as a preacher, vengeful as a man wronged. I was ready to fight to the death, bite the heads off chickens, anything.

A nerve twitched under George Pete’s right eye. Plates rattled and voices hummed around us. Marlon swished the ice in his glass, Sapers was silent. George Pete suddenly became interested in the design of his napkin. “Fine,” I said, and an era had ended. I turned my back on them contemptuously, the matador walking away from a spiritless bull, and led Petra and Phil to a table in the corner.

Something had changed. Some subtle alteration had taken place in the balance of things — I’d cut a new notch in the chain of being, and I could feel all the myriad creatures of the earth, from slippery amoebae and humping earthworms to the hordes of China, shoving over to make room like passengers on a crowded bus. As if in confirmation of this new state of things, the ancient waitress responded instantly to my merest gesture, though the place was packed. She poured us hot coffee, freshly brewed. The food came so quickly I suspected the cook of clairvoyance. It was hot, properly seasoned, tasty. The rolls were airy, the butter firm and pale. Phil and Petra discovered the common ground of sculpture and became fast friends almost instantly. When I looked up, Sapers and his party had vanished.