T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I turned to go — as I’d turned nearly nine months earlier, fresh from the city and stunned by the desolation of the place — and found myself confronting the calendar on the back panel of the door. I’d seen it a thousand times, ignored it, mocked it, forgotten it, but there it was. Still. The woman in the cloche hat with her face averted, the rubric of the year, the page splayed out and defaced by an unknown hand in forgotten times. A bad joke, nothing more.

We’d harvested prematurely, nearly two weeks ahead of the designated date. Today was the thirty-first — Halloween — and we were gone. Or going. Whatever the orphic calendar portended for the thirty-second anniversary of my birth — joy or calamity or provocation — no longer mattered. I reached out, slipped the calendar from the rusty nail that secured it, folded it once and tucked it into my back pocket.

The rain seemed heavier as I maneuvered the Toyota down the drive, past the block of pillow basalt and the downed tree limbs, and out of the clutch of the angry grasping branches. Water fanned out over the windshield faster than the spastic wipers could drive it back, the headlights made phantoms of the steaming tree trunks, my breath clouded the windows. I was picking my way carefully, maintaining momentum to keep from bogging down, my thoughts on Phil and Gesh and our rendezvous later that night, when all at once I found myself hallucinating.

There, against the soft stagy backdrop of the trees, was an apparition, the ghost of harvest past, the clown prince of the scythe, in motley and whiteface. Huge, swelling to gargantuan proportions under the approaching headlights, the figure slogged to the far berm and stood frozen beside the road. As I eased by, the flaring point of highest illumination giving way in a flash to invisibility, I understood that this was no hallucination. No, this was flesh, flesh with a vengeance: beneath the frippery I recognized the big bones and broad vacant gaze of Marlon Sapers. Marlon Sapers, mannish boy, got up as superabundant clown, replete with bulbous nose and pancake jowls, in a drenched ruffled shirtfront and baggy suit with dancing polka dots and writhing stripes, Marlon Sapers, come to mock me. I stopped. Rolled down the window to the teeth of the blow and peered back into the rubicund glow of the taillights. I could barely make him out. “Marlon?” I called. Water rushed past the wheels with the thousand moans of the drowning, rain drilled the roof. There was no answer. But then, reedy, childlike, as tinny as a bad recording, his voice came to me over the crash of the storm — he seemed to be complaining, or no, he was offering something. “Suck your feet?” he asked.

For a moment I lost him. The car coughed and spat, mist seeped out of the earth. Then he took a step forward and his face emerged from the night, pink, garish, huge, floating in the wash of darkness like an orb in the infinite. His expression startled me. He seemed to be grinning — Cheshire Cat, Robin Good-fellow — grinning as if in contemplation of some killing, suprahuman jest.

The pillowcase appeared from nowhere, legerdemain. It was bulging, wet as skin, its neck gaping wide between his big buttery fists. “Trick or treat?” he said.

I got into San Francisco about half past ten to find the mud-spattered U-Haul parked directly in front of my apartment — and poorly parked at that. One wheel was up on the curb, the cab obscured a sign that threatened TOW AWAY come seven the next morning, and Gesh had managed to straddle two and a half prime, precious, hotly sought-after and fiercely contested parking spaces. To cap it off, he’d settled beneath a high-intensity streetlamp that lit the rear of the truck like a stage. Our plan had been to meet at Vogelsang’s — we would surprise him with the truckload of pot and coerce him into allowing us to string it up to dry in his cavernous rooms and endless hallways — but the plan had fallen flat. Typically. As I discovered on arriving at the Bolinas manse, Vogelsang had eluded us once again. The gates were locked, the house was dark, the lewd mannequins stood guard. I found a note from Phil and Gesh pinned to the main gate. It read, simply, Fair Oaks.

My co-conspirators were sunk into the furniture in the front room as I plodded up the stairs with my suitcase and Phil’s guitar. They were drinking beer, testing the limits of the stereo system with an album called White Noise Plays White Noise , and watching a sitcom about a quadraplegic detective who ferrets out evildoers through astral projection. I was wet, weary, hypnotized to the point of catatonia by the incessant frantic swipe of the Toyota’s windshield wipers. The suitcase plummeted from my grip, Phil’s guitar dropped into the rocking chair. I cut the volume on the stereo and offered an observation. “You made it,” I said.

Still bandaged, still depilated, his bad eye blazing with the awakening joy of the exile returned, Phil swung round to acknowledge the soundness of my observation. Gesh set his beer down. “Vogelsang wasn’t there, the son of a bitch,” he said.

Outside, in the close, shadowy depths of the U-Haul van, a hundred bags of sodden marijuana stood ready to mildew, rot, deliquesce into soup. “So I noticed,” I said.

Another thing I noticed was the shopping bag at Phil’s feet. The paper was crisp and unblemished and it bore the logo of the corner market. Inside, atop a six-pack of generic beer, were five spanking-white cellophane-wrapped coils of clothesline. Phil was watching me closely. In the background, White Noise’s keyboard virtuoso was attempting an auditory re-creation of the siege of Britain. Gesh was watching me too. The bombs fell, the machine guns rattled. “What now?” Phil said.

We brought the pot in, a bag at a time, just after three. The streets were quiet, the glare of the streetlamp softened by a milky drizzle. Up the stairs and down, the landlord wondering at the thump of our footsteps, the sacks of contraband like body bags, like pelf, like the insidious pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We worked quickly, silently, our shoulders slumped with guilt, our eyes raking the streets for the first stab of the patrol car’s headlights. Phil stood in the back of the truck and tossed the bags forward, while Gesh and I hustled them up the stairs like ants scrambling under the burden of their misshapen egg cases. At one point a car stopped just down the street to discharge a passenger, engine rumbling, headlights slicing into the rear of the truck. We froze. A pair of voices echoed through the haze and bounded off the wet pavement, and a moment later a gangling teenager in a Gumby costume ambled up the street and into our midst. We gave him stares like swords. He looked down at his feet.

Upstairs, I regarded the spill of slick plastic bags as I might have regarded the debris of a natural disaster or the baggage of desert nomads. The living room was inundated, the kitchen piled high, the spare room glimmering with the dull sheen of plastic. Already Gesh had begun to string the rope across the living room, securing the ends with a quick booming convergence of hammer and nail. Phil twisted open the wet bags, shook the plants over the carpet in a tumult of rasping leaves, shuddering buds and precipitant moisture, inverted them with a flick of his wrist and hooked them over the clothesline like so many wet overcoats. I cracked a window, wondering what I’d let myself in for now. Then I set the thermostat at 95 degrees and started up a pair of ratchetting fans I dug out of a box in the basement. We worked furiously, noisily. Clumsy with exhaustion, we stumbled into one another: the hammer thumped, the bags rippled, our footsteps played a frantic tarantella across the ceiling of the apartment below. As Gesh’s hammer rapped at the wall for perhaps the fiftieth time, my landlord, a middle-aged bachelor with a viscid Armenian accent, rapped at the outside door. This rapping, unidentified at first, put us in mind of agents of the law and gave us a final nasty shock, a coda to the demonic symphony of such shocks we’d endured over the course of the past nine months. But then the landlord’s voice rose faintly from the well of the stairs—“Fee-lix!”—and I knew we’d been delivered once again.