T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I looked beyond him to the three glasses on the tray and in that moment felt the balance shift — if for a second the momentum had been with me, I’d lost it now. Three glasses. Why three? It was uncanny, unsettling: it was almost as if he’d been expecting me.

“It’s been a while,” he said, pushing the chair back and standing to face me.

My throat was constricted, as if I were standing before a packed courtroom and trying to swallow a lump of cold egg noodles while cross-examining a witness. “Why’d you lie to us?”

He was pouring wine into a long-stemmed glass. “Bordeaux,” he said, “Haut Brion, 1972. Ever so slightly tart.” He stepped toward me, then thought better of it, and set the glass back down on the table while he bent to refill his own. We were playing at host and guest — the ceremonial offering, the gracious smile and easy banter — and all the while billowing little bursts of rage were detonating in my head. Even at the best of times the wine was an affectation, like his stilted diction and his sangfroid. Something to have, to know about, to control. I’d never seen him drink more than half a glass in my life — why would he? Alcohol softens you, takes the edge away. The competitive edge.

“We’re celebrating tonight, did you know?” He gestured toward the table. “Cocopa. A woman and child. We found them together, in a single grave, just across the border in Sonora.”

This was archaeology night. Here we were, pals, a pair of old bone collectors sharing a bottle of good wine prior to the slide show. Well, I was having none of it. I stood there fuming, intransigent, waiting for an answer: I would not be put off. “You lied,” I said.

He rolled the glass between his palms, deciding something. I watched the light catch his hair and the way his shadow loomed toward me as he rocked back and forth on his heels. “All right,” he said finally, “I admit it. I lied to you.”

If there was a moment at which things could have gotten physical, it had passed, and he knew it. I could have flung myself at him like a kamikaze, I suppose, and I’d been close to it in that gut-tightening instant when he’d turned his back to me as if I were nothing — a child, a cripple, a pup — but we both knew he could have taken me easily. I had only to think of the night he’d brought Gesh down, of the primal look that had come into his eyes and the terrifying mechanical response of his body, to understand how futile it would be. I’d come to recover my dignity. Lying prone beneath Vogelsang as he applied the Montagnard death grip was no way to start.

I stood there in the doorway, itching like a gunfighter called out back of the saloon. There was a cold draft on my neck, the night smelled of wet leaves and eucalyptus buttons, I heard the ring of silverware from the kitchen, the sad stiff bones glowed under the lights, the dancing bobcats grinned at me. “You’re a worthless son of a bitch,” I said. “You’re a cheat and a liar.”

Vogelsang accepted this with his bemused little schoolmaster’s smile. Then, shaking his head as if I’d just misconstrued some basic theorem at the blackboard, he circled round me to the open door. “Mind if I shut this?” he said, sliding it closed. “Cold, you know?”

I’d backed off a step or two, and found myself wedged between a bust of Oscar Wilde and a potted palm; somewhere at the periphery of my consciousness the goatherd’s serenade slipped into a sort of slow, clangorous threnody. Vogelsang strode back across the room, barefoot, his calves creased with muscle, looking as if he’d just taken two out of three falls for the championship. I felt the bitterness in me like a hot wire. “But how could you?” I demanded. “I mean, what’s the point? You use somebody to make a few extra bucks for yourself like, like …” I was worked up, spilling over, bad brew. “What do you think you are, some fucking robber baron or something?”

Vogelsang settled into his chair, the inflammatory smirk still creasing his lips, and gestured for me to have a seat. He was in control now and he knew it. Unruffled, composed, calm as a pasha sated with figs and partridges whose sole worry was to relieve himself of a bit of gas before calling for his dancing girls, he fiddled with the sash of his robe, lifted the glass to examine his wine and then tipped it to his lips for a leisurely sip. I wanted to snatch a thick-knobbed femur from the table and drive it into his skull. I ignored the chair. I stood. Like a pillar.

“And what did you get out of it, anyway?” I said, digging in, trying to nettle him, my anger and frustration building in proportion to his calm. “Subtract for that bloodsucker Jones and your share’s going to be worth less than fifteen thousand bucks — you went and screwed us and you’re not even going to make your expenses back. You’re hurting, too. You lost. For once in your life, you lost.” My voice was stretched like wire, a whine, a taunt. I was a benchwarmer ragging the home-run hitter who’s just struck out, a playground brat with a mouthful of orthodonture jeering from the stands. I was getting personal.

And that was it, the key I’d been looking for, the way in. Vogelsang’s smirk suddenly fell in on itself. I could call him a cheat and a liar all night and it was Brer Rabbit in the briar patch — he throve on it; it fed his self-concept; he was the wheeler-dealer, the manipulator, the crafty, tough, amoral éUUbermensch who rises above the grasping herd to prevail — but to be accused of failure, called a dupe, a loser, was more than he could bear. I’d hit home. Bull’s-eye. “Face it,” I said, twisting the arrow, “you’re a loser.”

“No, Felix”—his tone had changed, the amusement dried up —“you’re a loser. You and Cherniske and that other halfwit. And Dowst, too. I made out, don’t you worry.”

What was he talking about? He’d made nothing, he’d made a mistake. “Bullshit,” I said.

Suddenly he was on his feet, catty, clonic, the old Vogelsang. He paced to the end of the table and swung round. “I bought that property in February, like I told you. But not this February. February two years ago. You know what I paid?”

I knew nothing. I was a loser.

“Ninety-two.”

Chink-doom , went the goatherd, doom-doom.

“You know what I’m getting — what I got ? Already?” The cords stood out in his neck like stitches in a sweater. “I signed over the title yesterday — the deal’s been cooking for months. Months.” He was twitching, jerking, dancing in place like an Indian whooping over the corpse of an enemy. “One-seventy. And do you know why? Because you improved the place for me.”

I sat down. Hard.

“That’s right. I had a deal with Sapers — and don’t give me that look, I played straight with you: he knew nothing about the pot. If I fenced the property line he’d let me tap into his electricity. I told him my writer friends would do it for the exercise.”

A cavern was opening up inside me, a pit, a chasm in which I could hear the faint reverberations of all the coppers, pennies, yen, groschen, forints and centavos of all the sad, grasping, multifarious generations as they plunged into the everlasting gloom.

“And I’ll tell you something else. I’ll do a little work on that Jeep and that pickup and I’ll unload them for more than what I paid for them. The PVC pipe is stacked in the garage right now. The generator and pump, too.” He’d moved closer now, his fingers dancing on the tabletop. The smaller skull was in his hand — alas, poor Yorick — and he was gesturing with it. “Don’t be naive, Felix,” he said in a voice that could have humbled the chairman of the board at ITT, “don’t be stupid. I don’t lose.”

My own voice was a croak, a dying crippled thrust of rebuke. “Jones. He was your man. You got together to cheat us.”