T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“What?” I snarled, turning on him like an attack dog. “What did we get out of it? Four thousand bucks?” I was frothing. “Big shit.”

“Better than Jonesie.”

Jonesie. The diminutive, no less. Ah, if I’d felt bitter to this point, chewing over my hurts and losses behind the snip of the scissors and the rattle of the spoon in the pot, now I was enraged, ready to strike out at anything that came into range. “Jonesie,” I echoed, mimicking him. “The leech. The cocksucker. He did nothing, nothing at all, not a lick — and for your information he’s going to wind up with more than any of us three.”

Rudy’s eyes dodged mine. “I can’t do nothing about that, man — don’t take it out on me.” Then he went into a little routine about how he knew the dude and all, but that didn’t mean he was his mother or anything, did I see what he was getting at? I saw. But there was something in his eyes he couldn’t control, a shiftiness, as if he was holding something back. He proferred the joint. I refused it. Vehemently. “Besides, I didn’t mean this year,” he said, exposing his gamy brown teeth in a conciliatory smile. “I mean last year. Vogelsang really screwed the guy.”

“Vogelsang?”

Rudy looked put out, angry and resentful suddenly, as if I’d spat down the front of his shirt or torn the stitches out of a knitting wound. For an instant I thought he was going to hit me. “Yeah,” he hissed, “your pal, the big wheeler-dealer, the dope king. Vogelsang.”

“Vogelsang?” I repeated, as, lost and directionless, I might have repeated the name of a distant subway stop in a foreign country. Something was up, toil and trouble, all my brooding suspicions congealing like the soup in the pot before me.

“It cost me money , man.” Rudy, of the downsloping chin and punished nose, of the pigeon chest and hepatic skin, was outraged, the thought of it more than he could bear. Take my mother, my sister, my old hound dog, but don’t you come near my blue vinyl checkbook.

I dropped the spoon in the pot, feeling weak, staring into his tumid glistening eyes as into matching crystal balls and groping toward illumination — or rather toward confirmation of what I’d known in my heart all along: Vogelsang had done us dirty.

Rudy shuffled his feet in agitation, bent to rub his knee; smoke tugged at both sides of his head like a hot towel wrapped round a toothache. “Son of a bitch talked me into putting up three grand. Two hundred pounds, he said, easy. We’d split even, me, him and Jones.”

Vogelsang, Vogelsang, the syllables pounded in my blood with evil rhythm. I felt betrayed, I felt hot and vengeful. I saw myself slipping into his shadowy museum, lifting one of the Cambodian pig stickers down from the wall, and creeping up the hallway; I saw the door to the bedroom, the waterbed, Vogelsang.

Loose-lipped, spilling his grievances like spew, Rudy went on. “So when Jonesie goes and gets popped, Vogelsang insists— insists , even though it’s no skin off his ass, I mean he’s not even up there or anything — that the plants have to go. Bud says no, don’t panic, it’s no big thing, and Vogelsang went up there and did it himself. At night. With his flashlight and his fucking gun. He cut the whole crop down and burned it, and you know what I got out of it? Shit. Zero. I’m the one that got burned.”

I felt reckless, stupid with fury, felt as I had when Jerpbak took hold of me in the Eldorado County Jail or when Jones stood sneering before me in the hot still cabin, the blackmailer’s filthy demand on his lips. And why hadn’t Rudy told us all this when his old friend Gesh and I visited him over that long and fruitless Fourth of July weekend? I knew, I knew now: to ask the question was to answer it. Because he was in collusion with Jones, that’s why. Because he wanted his money back. From anybody. From us.

I could smell the soup burning behind me. Rudy stood there, bones in a sack, lips pouted and shoulders sunk under the weight of the world’s injustice. Poor Rudy. He was drawing on the joint, about to say more, when I slapped it from his hand and shoved him against the wall. “Get out,” I said, my voice like an ice pick. “Get your sneaking ass out of my house.”

Shock and fear: Rudy was featureless, a smudged drawing, something to hate. I had him by the throat like a madman, his breath was sick in my face, his wrists clutched at mine as if we were playing king of the mountain or fighting for a football. “Hey,” he said, “hey,” terrified by the look on my face, writhing like something fished out of the mud, “leave me alone, man, I haven’t done nothing.” I held him there against a wall bristling with kitchen implements — graters and choppers, the cleaver, the butcher knife — held him like a goose or turkey to be throttled, twist of the neck, pluck him clean. “You’ve got two minutes,” I said.

Then I was out in the hallway, my jacket torn from the hook, rattle of car keys, Phil’s face, Gesh’s, the long aluminum table heaped with our sad, diminished and tainted gains, my feet on the steps, the outer door, the porch, the car. The engine caught with a roar and I lurched out into the street. I didn’t see traffic lights, flashing neon, the sweeping turrets of the Golden Gate Bridge. Through the glare of the oncoming headlights and the shadows lashing at the windshield, I saw one thing only: Vogelsang.

The night was clear, the moon a gift in the sky, a sharp unforgiving stab of cold on the air. Though the main gate was locked — barricaded like the portals of Teste Noire’s castle — I could see lights in the distance, and faintly, as in a midsummer night’s dream, I could hear snatches of music. He was home. I contemplated the glowing spot of the buzzer, the dark grid of the squawk box. Should I ring and announce myself like a dinner guest — or bound over the wall like a renegade? I’d come to the end of the line. I wanted answers, apologies, amends, I wanted to see Vogelsang on his knees, stigmatized by his guilt and begging forgiveness in a spew of mea culpas , I wanted to see him humbled like a Harijan outside the temple — maybe I even wanted blood. I don’t know, I wasn’t rational. Or I was rational in the way of a Son of Sam or a George Metesky, stealth and calculation on the surface, violence burning beneath like a primordial itch. I turned away from the buzzer.

Gravel crunched as I maneuvered the Toyota alongside the gate, squeezing in parallel, inches to spare. I had no thought — no conscious thought, anyway — of closing off the gate as if I were laying siege to the place, but that was the effect. My idea had been to use the car as a ladder, but as I hoisted myself from the Toyota’s roof to the top of the gate, I saw that I’d also managed to set up a blockade — as long as the car was there, no one was going anyplace. Blood sang in my ears; I heard the soft thump of drums from the direction of the house. Slowly, cautiously, with the grace that comes of necessity, I lowered myself down the inner side of the gate — it must have been ten feet high — and dropped into the darkness below.

All was quiet, save for the fitful melody drifting across the night from the dimly lit house. There were no crickets, no locusts, no katydids, the seething generation of insects that had chattered and gibed at me through the summer’s crises dead now, trod under. I moved toward the light, stealthy as an assassin. Down the drive, past Vogelsang’s faintly gleaming Saab and the pale backdrop of the eucalyptus grove — but what was that? The familiar outline of the Jeep, and beside it the Datsun pickup. Vogelsang had been busy.

Through another gate, circling round, and up the redwood steps to the back deck. No pets to worry about, no scurrying Siamese or lurching old hounds, no surprises or alarms. Breathing hard, I inched my way along the rear wall, a cloud of water vapor clinging to my face like a mask. The shades were drawn on the first window — kitchen or bedroom, I couldn’t remember which — but dead ahead a long parallelogram of light cut across the deck where the ballroom would be. Carefully, carefully. I edged toward it, the music dying and starting up again, louder now, more distinct: tabalas and tambourines, some sort of weird goatherd’s serenade pierced at intervals by an intermittent reedy piping that suggested a hobbled old fakir sporting a turban and dying of emphysema. Chink-chink, doom; chink-chink, doom.