T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

The following day I strolled into the shop at the usual hour and found her bargaining with an old road warrior over a four-hundred dollar stoneware table setting.

“Four hundred,” she said.

The old man was heavyset, pouchy and grizzled, in a new white T-shirt. His face was broad and sorrowful, collapsing on itself like a decaying jack-o’-lantern. “Three hundred,” he said.

“Four hundred.”

“Three-fifty.”

“Four hundred.”

“Three seventy-five.”

Light, airy, elegant, Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite fluttered effortlessly through the speakers as I walked in, wondering at the coincidence: was she trying to tell me something? Petra flashed me a smile, I winked in surreptitious acknowledgment, then turned to examine a soup tureen as if I’d never before encountered so exquisite an object, as if I could barely restrain myself from having it wrapped immediately and whirling round to bid on the old man’s crockery.

“Three-eighty,” he said, “and that’s my final price.”

But Petra wasn’t there to answer. She’d swept across the room, locking her arm in mine and effectively blowing my cover as the disinterested and anonymous pottery-lover. “Felix,” she gasped, grinning till all her fine teeth showed, strangely animated, ebullient, ticking away like a kettle coming on to full boil, “have you heard? Have you seen the paper?”

I hadn’t seen the paper. I lived like an ignorant pig farmer in a sagging shack three miles from the nearest hardtop road. “Heard what?”

“Jerpbak. They got him.”

“Who?” I cried, believing, disbelieving, already lit with a rush of anticipatory joy, already panting. I wanted to hear the worst, the vilest details, I wanted to hear that he’d murdered his wife, vanished without a trace, been run down by a carload of ganja-crazed Rastafarians. “What are you talking about?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” she said, skipping back to the counter for the newspaper. Befuddled, the old Winnebago pilot stood at the cash register, a two-pound ceramic plate in one hand, a sheaf of traveler’s checks in the other.

The story was on page six, tucked away amid a clutter of birth announcements and photographs of bilious-looking Rotarians and adolescent calf-fatteners. It was simple, terse, to the point. Jerpbak had been suspended from active duty pending investigation of assault charges brought against him by the parents of two juveniles he’d taken into custody earlier in the month. Charles Fadel, Jr., 16, son of the prominent Bay Area attorney, had been admitted to the Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital in Willits suffering from facial contusions, concussion, and fractured ribs; his companion, Michael Puff, 17, of Mill Valley, had sustained minor cuts and bruises that did not require emergency care. According to the official police report, Officer Jerpbak encountered the pair at 3:45 a.m. on the sixth of October as they were hitchhiking along Route 101 just south of Willits. They allegedly refused the reasonable request of a police officer in declining to identify themselves and subsequently resisted arrest, at which time the officer was constrained to subdue them. In filing charges, the parents of the juveniles contended that the arresting officer had violated the youths’ civil rights and had used unwarranted and excessive force in detaining them. (Oh, yes. I could picture the dark road, Jerpbak wound up like a jack-in-the-box; I closed my eyes and saw the bloody kid splayed out on the nurse’s desk.) CHP officials declined comment.

I read through the story with mounting exhilaration, then stopped to read it again, savoring the details. I clenched my fist, gritted my teeth: they were going to stick it to him, they were going to hang his ass. I felt as deeply justified, as elated and self-righteous as I had when I first heard the news of Nixon’s resignation. Jerpbak had got his comeuppance. There was justice in the world after all, justice ascendant.

Petra and I embraced. We danced round the shop, arm in arm, homesteaders watching the Comanches retreat under the guns of the cavalry. “We’ve got to celebrate,” I said.

Forgotten, the old man slouched behind his belly, watching us out of cloudy, lugubrious eyes. We were dancing in each other’s arms; he had a bad back, bad feet and an abraded memory. “All right,” he said, setting down the plate and scrawling his signature across the face of the topmost check, “I’ll give you four hundred.”

We went to the classiest restaurant in town, a place called Visions of Johanna that crouched like a tortoise behind the Blue Bird Motel. The cuisine was haute Mexican: cainitas, menudo, pollo en mole. We ate, we drank. The subject of niénTos, which had lain between us like the sword in Siegfried’s bed, never came up. Petra paid. Vindicated, victorious, flushed with passion, tequila and a sense of universal well-being, we went home to make triumphant love.

That was four days ago. When the sun was shining and the fields were blooming, when God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. Now it was raining. Phil, Gesh and I slumped open-mouthed round the telephone outside the forlorn Shell station, trying to cope with the sudden, monumental, liberating effect of Dowst’s injunction. “Harvest now,” he’d said, and it was a cutting away of the bonds, a dropping of the shackles. We were grunts in the trenches and the general himself had sent us the word: we’re going home, boys!

My mind was in ferment. I hadn’t seen Petra since the night of the restaurant, and I didn’t know when I’d see her next. We would be caught up in a seething rush of activity for the next several days, weeks even. We were harvesting. Packing up. Evacuating. And once we’d evacuated we’d have to find a place to dry, manicure, weigh and package the stuff, to say nothing of unloading it. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got to make a phone call. Could you guys wait in the car?”

The back of Gesh’s trench coat was soaked through. He was breathing in an odd, fitful way, his mind in the wet fields, flashing like a scythe. “We’re going to need a truck,” he said. “Something enclosed.”

Phil was nodding in agreement.

“Okay,” I said, “great. Just let me make this phone call and we’ll discuss it.”

I watched as they dodged off through the downpour, hitting the puddles flatfooted and snatching at their collars. Then I dialed Petra’s number and counted the clicks as the rain drummed at the tinny roof of the phone booth.

She was in the shop. Her voice was a pulse of enthusiasm, quick, high-pitched, barely contained. She was firing a new piece — a figure — her work was going well in the sudden absence of tourists. No, it wasn’t a grotesque, not really. She was going in a new direction, she thought: this figure a swimmer on a block of jagged ceramic waves, limbs churning, head down, features not so much distorted as unformed, raw, in ovo — she couldn’t seem to visualize the face. Weird, wasn’t it?

“Strange,” I said.

How did I like the rain?

“We’re harvesting,” I said.

Her voice dropped. “So soon? I thought—?”

“I just talked to Dowst. This much rain is going to kill us, it’s going to weaken the crop and make the smoke a lot less potent. We have no choice.”

A gust of wind rattled the booth, raindrops tore at the glass like grapeshot. I couldn’t hear. “What?” I said.

“So you’re leaving, then.”

“Yes.”

“Going back to the city.”

“I’ll call,” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

We rented a twenty-four-foot U-Haul truck and bought two hundred double-reinforced three-ply extra-large plastic trash bags and three sickles. It was getting dark by the time we introduced the truck’s big churning wheels to the riverine bed of the driveway. Gesh was behind the wheel of the truck and I was in the deathseat; Phil preceded us in the Toyota. There were no surprises. The truck staggered like an afflicted beast groaning in every joint, Gesh fought the wheel like Hercules wrestling the Hydra, I braced myself against the dashboard with both hands and feet, branches slammed at the great humped enclosure that rose up behind the cab and the wheels bogged down in mud. Six times. We took down saplings and beetling limbs with bow saw and axe, we propped up the wheels with skull-sized stones and rotted logs, we shoved, sweated and bled. Expert at this sort of thing, we managed to clear the top of the hill in a mere two and a half hours. The rain slacked off just as we rolled up outside the cabin, the clouds parted and the pale rinsed stars shone through the gap like the sign of the covenant. “Hey,” Gesh said, slamming the big hollow door of the truck and cocking his head back, “you know what? It looks like it might just clear up after all.”