T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Vogelsang handled it with perfect sangfroid. “I know nothing about you. I’d bought the land as an investment, and was surprised to hear that anyone was on it, shocked and stunned that illicit activities were taking place there. Under the table, of course, I pay all legal fees.”

Dowst had come alive at the mention of the verboten word. “First offense,” he said, sipping at his coffee. “No one’s going to jail — a fine and probation, that’s all.” I couldn’t be sure, but I thought 1 saw his hand quaver as he set the cup down.

Gesh looked angry — he opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it. Aorta was expressionless. Across the table from me Phil eased back in his chair, the effects of the scotch and wine evident in the skew of his bad eye. He was already in his new restaurant, eating oysters at a marble-topped bar. I didn’t know what to think.

“Don’t worry,” Vogelsang said, “I’ll take care of you.”

Perhaps it was the strange bed, the smell of the sheets or my excited imagination, but my dreams that night were exclusively erotic. Faces leered and tongues lapped, a thicket of pubic hair sprang from the ground, breasts and buttocks sprouted beneath me like vegetables, like fruit, ripe and wet and stippled with dew. Then I was downstairs, in the ballroom. Aorta was pinned to me, naked, her tongue was in my mouth, pasta bubbled on the stove, a legion of stuffed otters, beavers and bobcats stiffened their hackles, she was massaging my abdomen with the strange stiff bristle of her bleached hair. Then she broke away. Cruel and silent as the sphinx, she shifted round the room, playing with herself, taunting me until I lunged for her.

In one of those odd conjunctions of dream and reality, I was awakened by her voice. “Felix,” she was saying, her voice throaty and raw, as if cracked with sexual exhaustion, “everybody’s up.” I forced my eyes open. She was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a white robe, and she looked smaller than I’d remembered her, shrunken somehow, vulnerable. It was a moment before I realized what it was: she wasn’t wearing any makeup. No black lipstick, no punctured eyes, no skin-prickling claws. “Vogelsang’s making breakfast,” she whispered, hoarse, hoarse, and then turned and shuffled off down the hallway.

She was right. He was making breakfast: I could smell it. Coffee, Canadian bacon, flapjacks, eggs: the aura of the logging camp suffused the room, penetrated to the core of my being, and in that instant the genitive urge gave way to the alimentary. I jerked myself up and fumbled through my duffel bag for one of the new flannel shirts I’d bought for the summer camp. It was cold. As I buttoned the shirt, bacon in my nostrils, the chill air slapping at my thighs like a cold hand, I looked round the room with satisfaction. A moosehead hovered over the bed, the split-pine walls glistened with varnish, my jacket hung — simplicity itself — from a coat tree in the corner. I slipped into my jeans and workboots, feeling like a candidate for a cigarette ad.

Downstairs, in the big room we’d vacated in the dark, full of dark fears, there was a flood of sunlight. Everything was gleaming, pricked with light, from the glass of the display cases and the burnished copper of the espresso machine to the wild grinning eye Phil cast at me as I stepped through the doorway and held my hands out to the hissing fire. Phil was already at the table, hunched over a mound of flapjacks and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice; Gesh sat beside him, his plate empty, a Bloody Mary clutched in his hand as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet. I listened to the distant whine of a tea kettle, and to Vivaldi, who was measuring out the irretrievable moments as if to be sure we all had enough.

Vogelsang startled me. He slammed through the kitchen door, arms laden — coffee pot, pitcher of cream, a platter of eggs in poaching cups flanked by flat red slabs of bacon. He was wound up, so brisk he seemed awkward, each movement an effort to contain the flashes of energy that jerked at his fingers and set his limbs atremble. I thought he was going to lift off the floor and flap round the room like a cockatiel sprung from its cage, but he managed instead to set the platter down and boom a greeting at me. “Felix!” he shouted. “It’s about time.” He was wearing a running suit, chevrons at the shoulders, stripes down the seams of the legs. Too loudly, and far too cheerfully, he informed me that he’d already run seven miles and loaded the back of the pickup with our equipment.

I sat down and began to consume eggs. Vogelsang crouched at the head of the table, lecturing in spasms, alternately gulping fistfuls of garlic pills and ginseng and dosing himself with breath neutralizer. “Picks, shovels, a wheelbarrow,” he said, interrupting himself to swallow a desiccated-liver tablet. “A couple rolls of barbed wire and a come-along, and two little Kawasakis I’ve just finished overhauling. It’s all in the truck. Plus some odds and ends: an axe, a set of socket wrenches, claw hammer, that sort of thing. Oh: and the two-by-fours and whatnot for the greenhouse. Boyd will be up there at the end of the week, and he’s going to bring up the worm castings and seeds and all the rest in his van.”

Gesh was wearing a torn flannel shirt that featured cowboys with lariats, his hair was in aboriginal disarray and his eyes looked as if they’d been freshly transplanted. He mixed himself another Bloody Mary, threw back two Quaaludes and gave us a sick grin.

“You’ll need the bikes for patrolling the place once you get the crop in — three hundred ninety acres is no putting green, you know — and for handling the irrigation system during the dry months. But the first thing you’ve got to do — and this is vitally important — is to get that fencing up.” Vogelsang paused to shake the vial of breath spray irritably, set it down on the table and fumble in his pocket for another. Phil was reading the sports page. Gesh looked as if he were about to fall into his drink.

Half an hour later we were milling around Vogelsang’s driveway, preparatory to setting off on the four-hour drive to Mendocino County and the wild venue we would tame like the pioneers and prospectors we were. Gravel crunched under our feet. Birds piped and throbbled. Sunlight fell through the trees with a cheering insistence and the air was like milk. Vogelsang was fussing around the vehicles, cinching ropes and rearranging cartons of supplies, but I wasn’t paying him any attention. I was feeling the pulse of things, suddenly aware of that richness of color and texture you take for granted until you see it represented in oils or illuminating the big screen in a darkened theater. The smell of eucalyptus was as sharp as recollection.

Then Vogelsang was pumping my hand. Aorta stood beside him, restored to impermeability behind her layers of makeup and a black vinyl jacket. “Good luck,” Vogelsang said, reasserting his promise to look in on us in a week or so. Phil fired up the vehicle our benefactor had provided for us — an ancient, fender-punched Datsun pickup — and I climbed into the Toyota beside Gesh. “Where’s the ticker tape?” 1 called, grinning, as I turned over the engine and wheeled up the drive, feeling heroic, poised on the verge of greatness, ready for anything. The gears clattered, I waved my arm off, Phil fell in behind me and Gesh began to snore.

By the time we reached Santa Rosa the sky was the color of dishwater and sunk so low I had to turn the lights on. At Cloverdale, just below the Mendocino County line and fifty miles or so from Willits, our point of reference, it began to rain. Not with a burst of lightning or a roll of thunder, but with the sudden crashing fall characteristic of coastal precipitation.