T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I was forcing myself to move slowly, counting one, two, three seconds between steps, concentrating on images of bushwhackers, scalp-takers, naked sly Iroquois to whom the snap of a twig meant the difference between life and death, when all at once a cold stiff hand shot out to snatch at my arm. I jerked back reflexively, there was a sharp rasping as of a chair shoved back against a parquet floor, and next thing I knew I was frantically juggling one of Vogelsang’s mannequins. The mannequin had been propped against the wall, minding its own business, and I’d blundered into it. Now, eyeless, faceless, it came at me, toppling like a cut tree, like a corpse dislodged from its niche in the catacombs, and I was already shrinking from the crash, the alarmed footsteps, the burst of the floodlights and the click of the shell in the chamber of that black blazing shotgun, when I lurched forward at the last second to catch it with the plunging manic swoop of a tango instructor at the graduation ball.

For a full minute I hunched there, motionless, the mannequin clutched to my thundering chest. I listened for footsteps, waited for the shout of discovery. Nothing. The music went on as before, the piping intertwined now with a flat nasal moan that rose and fell like smoke over a campfire. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing on Vogelsang’s back porch in the dead of night — or what I was going to do — but somehow surprise seemed the key. For once I wanted to catch him off guard, take him by storm, blitzkrieg his sensibilities and blast his composure — for once I wanted the upper hand. And so I froze there, barely breathing, the slow seconds digging into my scalp like tomahawks, until I knew I was safe. Soundlessly, with relief and gratitude and oh such care — picture the novice paramedic lowering a nonagenarian with back problems onto the stretcher — I set the mannequin down. Then, still hunched low, I crept forward.

Vogelsang was sitting at the long table in the center of the room, his back to me. A pair of antique brass pole-lamps flanked him, lighting the table like a ticket booth, and he seemed to be deliberating over the arrangement of a welter of pale, rigid and faintly yellowed objects spread out before him — if I hadn’t known better I might have taken them for ivory backscratchers and chopsticks, for nose flutes and tortoiseshell combs dumped from the bag of a Hong Kong street peddler. Looking closer, I saw the cusp of a mandible, the swell of a partial ribcage, and at Vogelsang’s elbow, the thin-boned dumb-staring skull. Or no, a pair of skulls, face up, worn the color of weak tea and tessellated like parchment. I watched him pick up a polished toe- or finger-joint and compare it with another, then lift a heavy magnifying glass from the table and peer through it as if he were grading gems.

Barefoot, dressed in a short oriental robe with a sash round the waist, Vogelsang could have been a samurai taking his ease in the geisha house. His movements were slow and circumspect, the lamps cast an aureole about him, the fireplace flared as with a ritual blaze. There were the remains of a snack — fish flakes and ginseng, no doubt — and a bottle of wine and three glasses on the table beside him. To the far left, in the darkened stereo/TV nook, the fiery red light of the amplifier glowed, and the VU needles of the tapedeck dimly registered the percussive clank and moribund whine of the goatherd’s serenade. I saw the guns and knives climbing the walls, the dancing bobcats, glittering display cases and all the rest; there was no one else in the room.

I stood, a fragment of the night, a Ch’en Ta Erh hovering over the go-between’s bed, and tried the handle of the sliding glass door. The door was unlatched. One finger, the slightest pressure, and I’d cracked it an inch. The music sharpened suddenly, all edges, and I could feel the warmth of the room on my face. I hesitated, steeling myself, fishing for an opening line — what do you say to someone who’s violated a trust, used and manipulated you, who plays dirty yet never loses, someone lounging in his pajamas in his own living room and fiddling with a heap of discolored bones while the walls bristle with guns and knives and swords? Naaah, naa-aaah-naaah sang the goatherd, chink-chink, doom went the drums. It was then — just as I’d screwed up the nerve to throw back the door and spring into the room like an avenging demon — that Aorta swung through the kitchen door with a coffee mug in her hand. But it wasn’t the mug that caught my attention: no, not that. The first thing I noticed was that she was naked.

Thirteen years old, I’d peeped through the curtains at sad yeasty middle-aged Marge Conklin and watched her roll the sepia stockings from legs like suet, until I lost heart — something terrifying there, something claustrophobic and fatal — and sank into the bushes as if I’d been clubbed. I felt the same way now. Forbidden fruit, systems overload: I was electrified. Aorta crossed the room, her breasts gently swaying, the swath of hair caught like a juggler’s prop between her legs, and stopped to lean over Vogelsang and his sepulchral booty. She showed me her backside, tight, solid, slightly parted legs, ass wagging, as she brushed Vogelsang’s cheek with her lips and set the mug down on the table. I was riveted, turned on, hot as a moth doused with pheromones, but feeling guilty, too, ashamed: I’d come with high purpose, I’d come to vanquish deceit and wave the banner of decency, truth and honor, and here I was shuffling around outside the window with a hard-on like some pubescent Peeping Tom. I backed off and pressed myself to the wall.

When I looked again, Vogelsang was alone. Aorta had moved off into the shadows at the far end of the room: I strained to make her out. So long as she was in the room — and especially so long as she was prancing around in her skin as if she were about to rub herself down with coconut oil or powder her privates — I couldn’t burst in and confront Vogelsang. Could I? But why not, I thought, feeling a rush of evil, remembering my hurts. I’d come to take him by storm, right? How better terrorize him than to spring through the door with a bloody shout just as he mounts her amid the phalanges and vertebrae? Yes, I thought, grinning like a deviate, and I began to pray that she’d stop fiddling around in the dark and come back to distract him from his bones.

It was too fond a hope.

I was crestfallen — as voyeur and sadist both — when a moment later she emerged from the shadows in a short robe identical to Vogelsang’s and made for the kitchen again. But wait a minute. Was this Aorta? Stiletto nails and black lipstick, yes, the up-thrusting breasts and liquid legs, but there was something different about her — was it her hair? It seemed longer, darker, and the broad badger stripe was gone. Or was it something else — her chin, her nose, the way she moved? I couldn’t be sure. The kitchen door swung to, and she disappeared.

Now was my chance. I thought of Jones, Rudy, thought of nine months down the tubes and threw back the door with an apocalyptic rumble. Vogelsang glanced over his shoulder — casually, with the barest interest, as if he were dining at Vanessi’s and the cocktail waitress had dropped a glass at the bar — and then all at once his face went numb and I saw the spasm of alarm, the panic that froze in his eyes till they shone like the glass buttons of his badgers and bobcats. I was huge, I was terrible. A wave of malicious joy swept over me. “Felix,” he said, fumbling for my name as if he’d forgotten it.

I stepped into the room. Saying nothing.

Anyone else would have expressed shock, surprise, outrage, fear, anyone else would have demanded an explanation, reached for the shotgun or ducked under the table. But not Vogelsang. No: he was never surprised, never startled; like some serene alien being, some exemplar of cool, some god, he merely turned his back to me. I’d broken into his house in the middle of the night while his woman strutted around naked, I’d sprung from the shadows to strike terror in his heart and make him think, if even for an instant, that his reckoning had finally come, and he turned his back on me. I was stupefied, enraged, cheated even in this. Was he deliberately baiting me? I was about to bellow his name in stentorian wrath, scream it till the windows shook, when he turned slowly round with the bottle in his hand. He held it aloft, offering it. “Wine?” he asked.