T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“My place?” The suggestion was outrageous, preposterous — he might as well have named the Oval Office or the lobby of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Hundreds of pounds of marijuana strung up like dirty wash in my apartment? In the middle of the city? How would we get it in — or out?

Dowst’s voice pricked at me like a hatpin. “Look, I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that it’s supposed to rain for the rest of the week and you’d better get that shit in and dry it someplace.” The line crackled as if with the dislocations of the storm. “Harvest,” he said. “Now.” And then he hung up.

Phil and Gesh were looking at me as if I were a runner bringing news of foreign wars. “Well,” Gesh said, “what did he say?”

Rain spanked the glass walls of the phone booth; a dank wind rose up out of nowhere to assault my nostrils. Suddenly it didn’t matter. Inspiration came, joy, uplift. All at once I knew what we were going to do, and how. But even more important was the electricity of the understanding that came with it: we were free. The project was finished, harvest upon us. All we had to do was cut the plants, pack up and turn our backs on the place. Forever. No more Jerpbak, Sapers and the rest, no more lizards and rats, heat, dust, rain, cold, no more alarms in the night or bathing in a tub fit for crocodiles, no more Dowst, Jones, Vogelsang: it was over.

“Well?”

I was grinning. The rain fell steadily, dropping like the curtain on the final act of a wearying and protracted drama. “We harvest,” I said. “Now.”

Ever since the fire, I’d felt that the three of us had drawn apart in some subtle, indefinable way. We were still close — as close as any band of guerrillas under attack, as close as survivors, comrades, buddies, blood brothers — but the fire, as I’ve said, altered our perspective. As it became increasingly evident that the whole ill-fated project was a bust and that we’d sweated and agonized and given up nine months of our lives for nothing, we began perhaps to feel a bit shamefaced, embarrassed for ourselves, as though we were rubes taken in by a good but transparent pitch, as though we should have known better. The profits would be negligible, Mr. Big was an interdicted subject, the hazards mounted as the crops ripened, but it was understood among us that we would stick it out. We no longer bothered to perform calculations on the mental ledger sheet — solving for x was too unsettling. We were going to persevere, grimly, stolidly, Tess cutting sheaves at Flintcombe-Ash, Job staggering under the burden of calamity, and we didn’t want to know the score.

And so, once united behind the myth of success — the yachts, the restaurants, the equal shares of half a million dollars — we now by necessity drew into ourselves to avoid confronting its rotten wasted core. Gesh brooded. He took long plodding walks through the fields, his fierce Slavic gaze fixed on the ground, hair in a tangle, great bruising hands wadded behind him like tissue paper. Restless, he made a twenty-four-hour run to Tahoe for pharmaceutical meliorants; exhausted, he slept twelve hours a day. He seemed distracted, cankers of rage eating at him like some alien growth, disappointment, self-reproach and the ravages of heartburn sunk into his eyes. Increasingly taciturn, cryptic even, he became the evil genius of the place, a bristling presence to whom the least gesture of day-to-day life was a wellspring of bitterness. Throw a ringer to beat him at horseshoes, draw the winning card from the deck, and he looked as if you’d run a sword through him.

If Gesh was tangled up in himself, rootbound with frustration, Phil was the sensitive plant. For the first few days after his return from the hospital, he drifted from one room to another like a ghost, scratching idly at his crotch or the desolation of his crown, smiling little, saying less. He picked at his guitar for hours at a time (mournful single-string meanderings that sounded like lamentations for the dead), he stopped eating, chain-smoked pot; his bandages glowed in the dark. I came in from irrigating the plants or stood at the stove stirring a kettle of tuna, noodles, and cream of celery soup while Gesh glared at a tattered skin magazine and Phil gazed out the window as if he were witness to rare visions or rehearsing for the rapture. Acid emotions, short-circuited brainwaves: I felt pinched between them. “Phil, are you okay?” I asked after a day or two. No response. I repeated myself. “Me?” he said finally, as if he were one of hundreds present. “Oh, yeah, sure, no problem.”

Finally, just as I’d begun to suspect that the flames had somehow scoured the inside of his head as well as the outer tegument, Phil roused himself to action. It was early morning, four or five days after he’d got back from the hospital, the weather sere and hot, snakes stirring, rats nibbling, rain an impossible proposition. Gesh and I were on our way back from ministering to a thirsty if depleted crop, stepping gingerly, our ears attuned to the least rustle of leaf or twig (I held the shotgun out before me like an assegai, wary of snakes and poachers alike), when Gesh grabbed my arm and dropped his voice to a tense whisper: “What was that?”

“What?” I said, my chin the end-stop beneath the flaring exclamation point of my mouth, nose and brow. “That noise.”

We were cutting cross-country to save time, up to our knees in dense, reptile-nurturing brush, no more than fifty yards from the cabin. “I don’t hear anything,” I whispered, hearing it. It was a hiss: faint, sibilant, saurian, nasty. I released the shotgun’s safety catch. Cautiously, slowly, with more reluctance than curiosity, we made our way to the edge of the field that lay before the house.

What we saw was Phil. He was bent over something, his back to us, intent as a cannibal at breakfast. As I drew closer it became apparent that the hissing was not an expression of ophidian rage but rather the constant fulminating rush of burning gas: Phil was fooling around with his acetylene torch, playing with fire, shaping something. We came up behind him. Sparks flew. Rumpled, twisted, dull as dried blood, the dismal, rusted shapes of discarded machine parts lay in a jagged heap beside him like the debris of foreign wars. Phil was in the process of joining the spin basket of an abandoned washing machine to the amputated fender of a deceased Packard I’d tripped over at least sixty times since March. I asked him what he was doing.

Behind him loomed the charred skeleton of the shed; the blackened grass fanned out around him like a stain. I watched as he steadied the spin basket with one hand and carefully drew the torch along the base of it with the other. He finished the connection before he turned to look over his shoulder at us.

“It’s a bird feeder, right?” Gesh said.

Phil was wearing goggles. The dirty bandages clung to him like a second skin. He could have been a downed fighter ace, injured but game, hunched hopefully over the husk of his gutted jet. For a long moment he simply regarded us as if he’d never laid eyes on us before, the blue flame spitting from his fingertips as if in some magic act. After a while, he turned back to his work.

By nightfall a chin-high pyramid of conjoined junk rose from the ground where the greenhouse had once stood. I’d watched Phil from the shadowy interior of the cabin as morning became afternoon and the roving sun beat at his long nose and naked brow, watched as he dragged bedsprings across the stubble, caressed fenders scalloped like giant ashtrays, probed the slick bulging bellies of his objets trouvéeAs with the burning finger of his torch. He sifted through the ash and debris of the storage shed until he came up with the decapitated head of a pitchfork with its scorched and twisted tines, crabwalked across the back field like a man with bowel problems as he struggled with the gearbox of the weed-whipped Hudson that straddled the cleft of the ravine like a beached ship. He hammered, burned, melted, bent, wedged, clattered and thumped. There was noise, there was heat, creation blossomed amid the rubble, ineffable design confronted physics. When it was fully dark, Phil staggered into the kitchen to take nourishment.