T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“Is it done?” I asked. My tone was buoyant, warm, shot full of enthusiasm. Phil had been a zombie since the fire, not yet dead but not alive either, and to see him snap out of it was a relief. “Whatever it is,” I added. “What is it, anyway?”

Phil was bent over the gas burner, lighting a joint. I suppose the cannabinoids contributed in some mystical way to the purity of his vision — I was standing knee-deep in a bog and he was scaling creative Annapurnas. “No,” he said, exhaling fragrant smoke, “it’s not done yet.” Dried sweat chewed at his bandages with yellow teeth, his wild eye spun in its socket like a lacquered lemon in a slot machine. “It’s a, it’s—“ He broke off to take another hit. “It’s a tribute to us, I mean to the whole thing we’re doing up here.”

Gesh was slumped in the easy chair, his huge bare feet splayed out across the floor. “You mean like a memorial to the dead, right?”

“Come on, give us a break,” I said.

“What about the eye in the sky?” Gesh drew himself up and leaned forward. “You don’t think they’ll spot that pile of junk from anywhere in the range of five hundred to thirty thousand feet? You might as well put up a neon sign: ’Pot, a hundred and twenty dollars a lid.’”

Phil wasn’t listening. He was spooning papaya-coconut chutney on a slice of white bread and staring off at the flat black windows as if his gaze could drive back the night and illuminate the yard. The creative fit was on him.

It took him a week. After the second day he had to use a ladder. I went outside one morning to see how he was doing and found him perched ten feet off the ground, nesting in the crotch of his metallic aerie like some gangling unfeathered big-winged chick, the blue flame licking here and there, parts accruing. “How’s it going?” I shouted. Aloft, grinning, begoggled, he held up two fingers in the victory sign.

Gesh bitched. Lizards began to frequent the structure’s lower verges, twitching in the dazzling light, doing short-armed pushups and yelping from soft trembling throats. Birds shat on it, rats toured its tortuous walkways like prospective tenants looking over an apartment complex. The sum of its parts, Phil’s monument grew in unexpected directions, mad, random, sensible only to the inner vision that spawned it. Twice the artist made frantic trips to town to replenish his supply of brazing rods or refill one or the other of his tanks. Aside from those two brief hiatuses, he worked from dawn till dusk, skipping meals, ignoring his chores, his comrades, the plants blooming like medallions in the fields. Frayed, the bandages whipped round him in ectoplasmic flux, his pants and T-shirts were spattered and singed, skin began to peel in transparent sheets from his sunburned nose. On the sixth day he worked late into the night, the glow of the torch dimly visible beyond the darkened windows of the cabin. On the seventh day he rested. He rose about noon and summoned Gesh and me outside. Tottering on the porch, his eyes glowing feverishly, he gestured toward the mound of welded junk with a flourish and said “VoiléaG.”

Gesh gave me a sidelong glance. I tried to maintain my equanimity.

“What do you think?” Phil said.

Think? The thing was monstrous, anarchic, a mockery of proportion and grace of line. It looked like a heap of crushed and rusted French horns and tubas, it looked like a dismantled tank in the Sinai, it looked like the Watts Towers compressed by an Olympian fist. I walked round it, Phil at my side. Twenty feet high, wide around as my bedroom floor, it was monumental, toothy, jagged, unsteady, a maze of gears, bolts, hammered planes and swooping arcs. “Nice,” I said.

Gesh’s hands were sunk deep in his pockets. He was grinning, fighting down a laugh, his face animated for the first time in days.

Phil took my arm and backed off a pace or two, maneuvering for a better perspective. “I was thinking of calling it Agrarian Rhapsody “ he said, “but now I’m not so sure. What do you think of Burned ?”

If my co-workers had motivational problems during those declining weeks at the summer camp, I had my bouts of self-doubt and despondency, too. I felt useless, I felt as if I’d been sold a bill of goods, deceived, I felt like Willie Loman at the end of the road. But just when my spirit had shrunk to a hard black knot, the fire delivered me up to Petra and I felt my priorities shift like tectonic plates after a seismic storm. I’d been standing on one side of the rift, and then as the gulf widened I’d leapt to the other. Gesh ate himself up, Phil sought solace in art, I was in love.

The others didn’t like it, not a bit. By introducing Petra to our inner circle, I’d compromised the project, weakened our position irretrievably. First I’d screwed up with Savoy, and now I’d willfully violated our vow of secrecy and my promise to remain on the property as long as Jerpbak roved the streets and the plants grew straight and tall. Phil looked the other way, Gesh muttered and swore, Vogelsang — had he known — would have mounted the pedestal of righteousness and denounced me for a turncoat and a fool, but nearly every afternoon during that three-week period between the fire and the rains, I cranked up the Toyota and drove into Willits. I couldn’t help myself. Didn’t want to. The summer camp was moribund; this was newborn.

I would saunter into her shop at four each afternoon — horny as a tomcat, aching, throbbing, my eyes and fingertips, my tongue, lips, and nostrils swollen with lust — and feign indifference as she chatted with a customer or watch transfixed as she sat at her wheel, shaping clay beneath the pyramid of her long tapering fingers. The shop closed at five. I would have been up since seven, tending the plants for the first hour or two, then killing time with walks, cards, trashy paperbacks, the ritual of meals, the one-o’clock siesta, all the while palpitating for the hour of my liberation like a dog awaiting the scrape of his master’s heel on the doorstep. If there were no customers, I’d walk straight in, soothed by the music of the bell, the shadows, the cool plants and glistening triumphant pots, the music of Boccherini, Pachelbel, Palestrina, find her in her smock before the glowing oven or bent over the wheel, and stick my tongue in her ear. Sometimes she was busy, and I would wait; other times we would wrestle on the floor, naked in the clay, and let the angels sing.

I liked it best when there were customers in the shop. Then I could browse, anonymous, a customer among customers, pondering this object or that, my fingers tracing the persuasive, gently swelling convexity of a vase or cupping a smooth glazed bowl as if it were an object of erotic devotion. This was the season of the late-blooming tourist, the golden ones, retirees in Winnebagos and Sceni-Cruisers, smiling their wan beneficent smiles, dropping Mastercard slips and traveler’s checks like manna. I heard madrigals and watched her lips, I hummed along with motets and saw the pregnant look she gave me over the stooped white heads of couples who’d been married fifty years. The anticipation was delicious. I watched her, ogled her, coveted her in the way a child covets the foil-wrapped gifts beneath the Christmas tree — the breasts pushing at her smock, the long impossible fall of her legs, the even white teeth, and the flawless tender expanse of her lips as she beamed at some sunny old character’s blandishments. Five o’clock would come and I’d help her close up the shop, draw the shades, count out the receipts with trembling fingers, touching her, and then I’d take her upstairs and ravish her. Or rather, during that first week when my hands were still bandaged, she ravished me. Upstairs, on her bed, under the greedy voyeuristic gaze of her dwarves and elves and pinheads, she undressed me, button by button. Then she took off her smock.