T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Now we stood confused amid the apparent ruins of it. Raindrops tapped at our backs like insinuating fingers, water puddled the ground, streamed from our hats and shoulders. The trees drooped like old men with back problems, the fierce jungle smell of ripe pot stunned the air, raw and chlorophyllific; the carcass of a rat lay twisted and dumb-staring in a trap at my feet. None of us had been out of the house since the rains had begun, and we weren’t quite prepared for the transformation they’d wrought. Whereas three days earlier we’d been tending plants twelve and fourteen feet tall with branches arching toward the sun like candelabra, now we were confronted with broken limbs, splayed growth, the declining curve. Fully half the plants had ruptured under the water-heavy burden of the flower bracts, and all were bent like sunflowers after a frost. In the lower corner of the plot I found a six-inch cola — prime buds — immersed in a soup of reddish mud. It was as if someone had gone through the field with a saber, swiping randomly at stem, branch, leaf and bud. My thoughts were gradual. Still stoned, I looked round me in a slow pan — everything seemed to be moving, divided into beads of color, as if I were looking through a microscope. Somehow my heartbeat seemed to have lodged in my brain.

“What now?” Phil was standing at my side, Mr. Potatohead, carrot nose and cherry tomato eyes. The rain thrashed the trees like a monsoon in Burma.

“I don’t know,” I said.

So much water was streaming from my hat I had to turn my head and look sideways to see him. We might as well have been hooked to the conveyor track in a car wash. “This could go on forever,” he said.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Anything positive, that is.

“So what do we do?” he said. “Wait and hope it clears up, try to harvest now, or what?”

It was a resonant question, pithy, full of meat and consequence, the question I’d been asking myself for the past several minutes. “We call the expert,” I said.

Half an hour later, after schussing down the driveway in the Toyota, fighting erratic windshield wipers and skirting Shirelle’s Bum Steer, Phil, Gesh and I crowded into a phone booth at a Shell station just outside Willits and phoned Dowst. I did the talking.

“Hello, Boyd?”

A pause. I could picture him hunching over his typewriter in a glen plaid shirt, sipping hot chicken-noodle soup and typing out his notes on the wild onion or the water wattle. “Christ, I thought you guys would never call,” he said. “What’s going on up there?”

“It’s raining.”

Another pause, as if we were speaking different languages and he had to wait for the translator to finish before he could respond. “Well, yes, of course. What I mean is did you get the stuff in yet?”

“You mean the plants?”

We hadn’t seen Dowst in a month, since he’d finished culling the crop. Just before he left, he’d strolled up to the horseshoe pit and announced in sacerdotal tones that all the remaining plants were females and that we had nothing to worry about, and then he’d taken me aside. He was wearing a sober don’t-jump-on-me-it’s-out-of-my-hands expression, partly defensive, partly apologetic — he could have been a surgeon breaking the news that he’d made a slight miscalculation and removed my liver rather than my gall bladder. “Felix,” he said, “you know we’re going to harvest a lot less than we expected. A lot less.” Yankee farmer, Yankee farmer, I thought, looking into those eyes rinsed of color through the generations of toil in the bleak rocky fields of New England. Lizards scurried in the dust, the clank of horseshoes beat at the moment like a blacksmith’s hammer. “I know,” I said. Then he shook my hand in a way that disturbed me, a way that seemed both empathetic and final. It was a scene from Kamikaze Hell or Z ero Hour Over Bataan: he was bailing out. “I got that job, you know — did I tell you? At Berkeley. I start in the spring.”

What could I say? We’d worked side by side, pitched horseshoes and played cards together, and yet I felt nothing, nothing but bitterness. My smile was fractured, inane, a grimace really. “Great,” I said.

“See you,” he said, turning to head for his van. A woodpecker drummed at dead wood off in the forest; overhead, in the reaches of space, lightwaves bent like coat hangers as they responded to the gravitational tug of distant suns. “You’ll be back soon?” I called, thinking of the harvest. Perhaps he didn’t hear me. I remember the way the sunlight glanced off the side panel of his van as he rolled across the lot.

Now it was raining. Gesh’s shoulders crowded the booth’s open doorway; water spilled from the upturned collar of his khaki overcoat. Phil pressed himself flat against the glass beside me. On the other end of the line, Dowst raised his voice. “Don’t you guys realize that a rain like this is going to sap the plants? You’ll get withered stigmas and the gland heads’ll wash away, which means you’re going to get one hell of a less potent harvest — you leave it out there much longer, you’re not going to get shit.”

I found Dowst’s usage disturbing: the genitive form of the personal pronoun had shifted from “ours” to “yours.” We were asking for help, advice, for the expert judgment he’d contracted to deliver, and we were getting a brush-off. Dowst wasn’t in trouble; we were. He’d cut us adrift, lost interest. He’d written the whole thing off as a failure and had no intention of showing his face again — except to pick up his share of the proceeds. Anger rose in me like some hurtling, uncontainable force — a spear thrust, a rocket blast. “What the hell do you mean?” I said, my voice choked tight. “You’re in on this, too. You’re the so-called expert here, aren’t you?”

At this juncture, Gesh snatched the phone from me and shouted into the receiver. “Get your ass up here, scumbag!” he roared, the phone like a throttled doll in his huge, white-knuckled fist.

I wrestled the receiver away from him. “Boyd?” I said, but Gesh, his face like hammered tin, tore it out of my hands and screamed “I’ll kill you!” into the inert black bulb.

“Boyd?” I repeated when I’d regained control of the receiver. “Are you there?”

His voice was distant, cold. “Get the plants in.”

I appreciated the injunction, but just how were we supposed to go about it? It had been apparent for some time that Dowst, Gesh, Phil and I would be on our own when it came to harvest. No one mentioned Mr. Big any more — clearly the deal was off. He only dealt with major operators, the guys who grew pot like Reynolds grew tobacco. We were nothing. Not only would we have to harvest and slow-dry the plants, we’d have to manicure the buds and peddle them ourselves. But Dowst’s expertise was essential to all this: without him we were helpless. “Wonderful,” I said, “super,” a heavy load of sarcasm flattening my tone, “but how?”

“That’s up to you. Rent a truck or something.”

“But what then? I mean where are we going to dry it and all?” The plan had called for giving the crop another two weeks or so to come to the very cornucopian apex of potent, fecund, resin-dripping fruition, after which we would hack the plants down and string them across the lower branches of oaks, ma-drones, etc., to desiccate in the dry seasonal winds. Meteorologically speaking, the plan was all washed up.

There was a pause. Phil tilted his rainhat back, exposing a swath of filthy gauze; the set of his mouth, a certain redness about the lower nostrils and a roving rabbity gaze betrayed his anxiety. Gesh stared straight into the receiver, as if his eyes could hear. “What’s wrong with your place?” Dowst said.