T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Phil and I gazed hopefully at the heavens. Just then the moon emerged, cut like a sickle, and the clouds fell away in strips. “Yeah,” I said after a while, “I think you might be right.”

He wasn’t.

In the morning it was raining again. Hard. The earth sizzled, the sky was a cerement, the rain heaved down brutally, retri-butively, with crashing fall and stabbing winds out of the northwest. Inside, it wasn’t much better. Brownish swill drooled from the ceiling, filling and overfilling the receptacles flung randomly across the kitchen floor, wind screamed through the planks, the sodden beams groaned beneath my feet like arthritic old tumblers at the base of a human pyramid. The house was sapped, enervated, falling to ruin. I couldn’t have cared less. If, as in some vaudeville routine, the entire place collapsed the moment we slammed the door, so much the better.

Shivering in the early-morning cold, I eased down on the living room floor to pull on my socks and shoes. I wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table or on the couch or easy chair for the simple reason that they no longer existed — at least in the form we’d known them. In a festive mood after winning the battle of the U-Haul, we’d dismantled the furniture, feeding the combustibles into the wood stove while toasting our imminent departure with the dregs of our liquor larder (two fingers of bourbon, three of Kahlua, a faint whiff of vodka and half a gallon of soured burgundy that tasted like industrial solvent). I laced my boots to the mocking chatter of the rain, and then, hosed and shod, I sloshed my way to the stove as Gesh rambled about overhead and the decelerating rhythm of Phil’s snores indicated that he was about to emerge from the grip of his dreams.

The kitchen was a palette of life, blooming with rank growth, with festering sludge and the primordial agents of decay. A rich blood-red fungus that apparently throve on periodic incineration clogged the stove’s jets, exotic saprophytes stippled the walls, the counters were maculated with splotches of blue-green mold from which black filaments arose like trees in a miniature forest. The smell was not encouraging. If the place had been barely habitable when we moved in, it looked now as if a troop of baboons had used it for primal therapy. I shrugged and struck a match, surveying the room for the penultimate time. Then I shoved aside the crusted kettle in which the remains of our last supper were slowly congealing, and put on the water for coffee.

We tackled the Khyber Pass first.

Up the precipitous slope, stumbling over mud-slick streams like Sherpa rejects, the rain driving at our faces. We wore improvised rain gear — plastic trash bags, hastily tailored to admit necks and arms — and we carried our sickles like weapons. Slash, hack, slash. Top-heavy, the plants gave way at the first swipe. We caught them in a dazzling rush of leaves, shook them out like big soggy beach umbrellas and unceremoniously stuffed them into trash bags. The bags skipped gracefully down the slope, and we followed them, staggering, careening, already as mucked over as alligator wrestlers. Then we proceeded to Julie Andrews’s Meadow and Jonestown, and finally to the marginal areas that lay on the far wet verges of the property.

We were finished by three in the afternoon, every leaf, bud and twig bundled up and stowed away in the rear of the U-Haul. Stacked up there like sandbags atop a levee, the bulging bags of pot looked like a king’s ransom, like paydirt and wealth abounding. We knew better. After drying, the bulk of the crop would be so much dross: it was only the buds that concerned us, and well we understood how few they were likely to be. Still, we felt elated. Despite the rain, and considering the sweat, toil and emotional trauma that had gone into raising it, the crop had been surprisingly simple to harvest. We were rapid reapers, the cat burglars of the open field, snatching the goods and filling our sacks. Cut, bag and load. That was it. We were done. The summer camp was history.

Gesh hustled his paper sack of dirty underwear and other worldly baggage out to the Toyota while Phil packed up his priceless mementoes, disintegrating sci-fi paperbacks, his guitar and torch. I bundled my clothes, stuffed them into the sleeping bag and collected the coffee pot and colander we’d liberated from my apartment in the city. The rest we left. The mile and a half of PVC pipe, the cattle troughs, the water pump, the motorbikes, the pickup and the nonfunctional Jeep. Not to mention the shotgun and the crooked.22, the ruptured sacks of garbage and Phil’s heroic junk sculpture. It all belonged to Vogelsang. Let him come and get it.

My partners launched the U-Haul down the hill, twice foundering on dangerous shoals and once coming within a tire’s breadth of pitching over the side of a precipice cut like the face of the Chrysler Building. We encountered our Charybdis in the guise of a swirling spectacular pothole that nearly wrenched off the left wheel, and then moments later our Scylla loomed up on the right in the form of a stray chunk of pillow basalt the size of a Volkswagen. The trees dug their talons into the flanks of the truck as if to hold it back, the front end shimmied like a school of anchovies in distress and the rear doors flew open twice, spilling bags of pot into the free-flowing roadway. Minor impediments all. We made the necessary repairs and adjustments and floated the big treasure-laden truck down the drive like a stately galleon. I saw my comrades out to the blacktop road, gave them the thumbs-up sign and started back up the hill for the Toyota.

It was getting dark by the time I reached the cabin. Hurrying, I emerged from the grip of the trees, strode across the field and past the waiting Toyota, up the steps of the porch and into the house for my final look around. The place was silent, penumbral, already haunted by our absence. Nothing had changed, but for the disappearance of the furniture, and yet the low, littered rooms had been transformed — whereas before they’d had the look of healthy seething squalor, now they stood derelict. After all that had gone on in these rooms, after all the confrontations, disappointments and anxieties, after all the bullshit sessions, card games and miserable meals — after all the living we’d done here — the place was dead. I felt like a historian pacing off the battlefield at Philippi. I felt like a grave robber.

I stood there in the center of the room for a long moment, watching the shadows swell and darken like living organisms, listening to the inexhaustible rain as it spanked the ground beneath the eaves. What was I waiting for? What was I doing? I shook my head like a drunk under the shower and then walked down the hallway to my room to see if I’d left anything. The door pushed open to the scrape of frantic feet and there was a blur of movement as the rat flew along the baseboard and vanished in the shadows; he’d been digging into the stained and stinking underbelly of my mattress as he might have dug into a corpse. Naked tail, a brush of whisker and the quick flashing eye: he’d been reinstated, restored to his rightful dominion. The mattress, the fetid soup cans and mouldering chicken bones, the 3-in-1 oil and the complete adventures of Bors Borka: these were his legacy.

Looping filaments of dirt festooned the walls, the floor sagged in the center as under the force of some invisible weight, a lustrous tan spider slid up and down the guys of its trembling web like a finger on the neck of a banjo. I hadn’t forgotten anything. The wastebasket was full, scraps of glossy magazines (idealized photos of food and women, in that order) slashed at the walls, newspapers, torn flannel shirts and worn jeans lay heaped on the floor. I’d left them consciously, purposely, as I might have left them in a burning building or a foundering ship: why bother, after all? The whole run-down, gutted, roof-rent slum was nothing more than an oversized refuse bin, was the essence of trash itself.