Budding Prospects (19 page)

The second problem was more complicated, human rather than mechanical. The problem was Lloyd Sapers. According to legal agreement, Sapers had access to the central road bisecting our property and plunging down into the valley to the southeast. This was his fire road—his escape route in the event that the primary road was blocked by fire, no mean consideration in an area that grew progressively drier until at the end of the season the hills were as volatile as balls of newsprint soaked in gasoline.

On the morning after we’d broken in the irrigation system, Vogelsang, Aorta and I were gathered around the breakfast table while Phil and Gesh watered the Khyber Pass and Dowst huddled in the greenhouse, trying to perform horticultural miracles with a handful of withered seeds and a bucket of Nutri-Grow. Since his arrival two nights earlier—he’d come, reluctantly, to oversee the completion of the irrigation system—Vogelsang had been jumpy as an air-raid warden. Nervous about everything from poison oak to pot poachers to detection and arrest by the DEA, FBI, IRS and the Willits Sheriff’s Department, he was practically clonic, every facial muscle twitching, fingers drumming the tabletop, legs beating like pistons. In a word, he was wired.

This was understandable. With a forest of eighteen-inch plants in the ground, we were all edgy—they had the goods on us now—but Phil, Gesh and I had come to grips with our fears. Or at least we tried to obliterate them through the abuse of drugs and alcohol and an unwavering commitment to the sustaining visions of Rio, Cajun seafood houses and fat bank accounts. We had no other choice: unlike Vogelsang, we had to live with the threat of exposure day in and day out. For well over a month, for that matter, I’d been living with the knowledge of what Savoy had said to me that night—
everybody knows what you guys are doing up there
—a festering little secret, hidden close. Before the words had passed her lips I was on my feet, pretending I hadn’t heard her, making apologies. I glanced at my watch, slapped my forehead, shrugged into my jacket and staggered out the door like a hamstrung deer. When I got back to the cabin, the lights were out. Just as well, I thought, inching my way through the
darkness to my room, spun round with alcohol, panic and the finality of my decision. I was in this thing to the end: Give me pot, or give me death, I thought, giggling to myself. No teenager with an uplift bra and unsized eyes was going to scare me off it, nor Jerpbak, voodoo calendars or shotguns, either. I could take it, liberated by the pledge I’d made myself, burst from under the pall of the sickness unto death and into the light of faith. But why worry Phil and Gesh?

Now, with Vogelsang twitching across the table and rattling on about Krugerrands, gypsum and Oriental rugs, I couldn’t resist sticking it to him just a bit, as he’d stuck it to me over the issue of the guns. “Oh, by the way,” I said, cutting him off in the middle of a panegyric to Bokharan weavers, “did I tell you a plane came over the other day?”

Vogelsang set down his spoon, shot a glance out the window and then fumbled in his pocket for the vial of breath neutralizer. “Really?” he said, a barely perceptible sob cracking his voice.

“Cessna, I think. One of those little jobs with the sculpted cockpit and the propeller out front?”

He nodded. His features were drawn together, a string bag tightening at the neck, and the veins in his temple began to pulse.

The plane had come roaring over the hill, big as a truck, no more than three hundred feet up. It buzzed the house twice, then circled the property and vanished over the far ridge. When it appeared Phil and I were out in the yard, fully exposed, unloading lengths of PVC pipe from the back of the pickup. First there was the explosion of noise, then the dust and the big swooping shadow, and then Phil was bolting for the house shouting, “Load up the car!” He’d actually tossed two boxes of his priceless mementoes into the back of the Jeep before I could calm him down.

“Probably from that airstrip in Willits,” Vogelsang said. “One of those weekend daredevils.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. But it wasn’t pleasant, that’s for sure. With two thousand holes in the ground this place must look like Swiss cheese from up there.”

Vogelsang rapped the tabletop with the vial of breath sanitizer, then raised it to his mouth for a quick fix, as if vigilance against
halitosis were the first step in his plan to subvert detection and subdue the world to his fiduciary advantage. Aorta slouched over an uneaten bowl of Familia, absorbed in a copy of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, her nose ring flaring in a ray of early-morning sunlight. I was about to amplify the story of the Cessna—
the eye in the sky
, Gesh had called it—when suddenly the cabin began to tremble on its frame and a rumbling burst of sound threw me from my chair.

Earthquake? Lightning bolt? The Russian invasion? The three of us lurched back from the table and rushed to the window, where we watched in stupefaction as an odd little parade passed in review. Sapers, on a huge thundering bulldozer, was steaming along the road adjacent to the house, followed by his son, Marlon, on a flatulent Moped. Intent on the controls and hunched in his filthy coveralls, Sapers never even turned his head; Marlon, his glasses glinting in the sun and big fleshy thighs and rear engulfing the bike as an amoeba might engulf a food particle, looked up, flashed us the peace sign, and then vanished into the trees along with his father.

For an instant we were immobilized, struck dumb with panic and outrage. Then all three of us were out the door in blistering pursuit. “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” I choked as we leapt obstacles in the field and sprinted into the narrow roadway like hurdlers coming on for the tape. I was incensed, mortified, shot through with homicidal rage. What if he blundered off the road and into one of the growing areas? What if he caught sight of Gesh and Phil with the hoses or heard the pump? Vogelsang cursed, a series of truncated, doglike grunts, as he pumped his legs and flailed his goggles like a weapon; Aorta, gritting her teeth, ran neck-and-neck with us for a hundred yards or so before she stumbled and pitched forward into the dirt. We hardly noticed.

Vogelsang and I were nearly at the bottom of the hill, a few hundred yards east of the water pump, when we ran out of breath and slowed to an agitated, stiff-legged walk. Hearts hammering, we hurried along the roadway until we emerged from a stand of laurel to see Sapers up ahead of us, maneuvering the bulldozer as if he were taking evasive action. As we drew closer, we could see Marlon standing in the shade of a tree and drinking
something from a thermos, while his father dropped the blade of the bulldozer and began slamming away at the surface of the road. “Oh, Christ,” Vogelsang said, quickening his gait, “he’s grading the road.”

He was indeed. We watched helplessly as he reversed gears, swung right and left, rumbled forward behind a ridge of detritus, cleared culverts, crushed vegetation, leveled and de-rutted the nearly impassable roadway. Gears wheezed, black diesel smoke snatched at the sky. “Hey!” I shouted, but the big polished treads just kept grinding along. Sweat coursed over my body—streams, rivulets, mighty deltas—the sun raked my face and thrust a clawing hand down my throat. Beside me, Vogelsang danced in place, pogo-ing up and down like a Masai tribesman. Though his face was concealed, I took his body language to indicate that he was feeling as disturbed, confused and impotent as I was. A few minutes later Aorta limped up to join us, and after watching the bulldozer churn back and forth a moment longer, we turned as if by accord and strolled over to where Marlon stood in the shade of a twisted oak.

“Hello,” Vogelsang said, peeling back his surgical mask. Marlon’s immediate reaction was to bend awkwardly for the big plastic thermos and cradle it in his arms, as if he was afraid we’d come to snatch it away. He didn’t say a word, merely blinked at us out of pale demented eyes. His head was cropped as closely as Aorta’s, and it seemed disproportionately small against the bulk of him, the head of an ostrich or a sleepy brontosaur. “You know how far up the road your father’s planning to go?” Vogelsang asked.

Marlon looked wildly from Vogelsang’s face to mine, as if we’d asked him to betray his family to the Gestapo or drop his pants and recite poetry, before his eyes finally settled on Aorta. A change suddenly came over his face. He gave her a long, lingering, stupefied look, a look compounded of wonder, greed and unbridled anarchic lust, and then he flushed red and turned away.

“Marlon,” I snapped, striving for that tone of inquisitorial menace and condescension mastered by schoolmarms, drill sergeants and professional torturers, “you’re on private property now, you know—our property—and we want to know just what
you think you’re doing here.” Meanwhile, I noticed with mounting panic that Sapers was moving his bulldozer back up the road in the direction from which we’d just come—toward the hill and our burgeoning secret.

Marlon looked down at his feet (they were encased in black sneakers the size of griddles), and then lifted the thermos to his mouth and took a huge slobbering swallow that left his chin streaked with dark liquid and his shirtfront damp. He bobbed his head and his mouth began to work, some terrible trauma pushing itself up from his inner depths to convulse his frame with seismic shudders. “Drinking Coke,” he said finally with a sob. Then he turned his back on us and his great fleshy shoulders began to heave.

All at once there was a hoot of surprise from Sapers and we jerked round to watch him ram the bulldozer into neutral and leap down from the thing in a geyser of water. Even from where we were standing I could see the ruptured plastic pipe, snapped like a twig and flung over the cutting edge of the blade in a sorry inverted
V.
Water spurted thirty feet into the air—a magic fountain, a gusher, a lid-flipped hydrant on 142nd Street—and suddenly we were running again. Out of breath, crazed, our cards laid out on the table for anyone to read.

As we drew closer I could see that Sapers was clearly bewildered, the Willits Feed cap clutched in one grimy hand while the other scratched at the back of his head. “Lloyd!” Vogelsang shouted, stripping back goggles and hood, and Sapers turned to us with the blank uncomprehending stare of a flood or quake victim. “Lloyd, it’s me, Vogelsang.” Sapers had, of course, been aware of us all along, but had chosen to go about the business at hand rather than bother with social amenities. He had nothing to say to us in any case. Now, though, as I saw the look of enlightenment fan across his features, I realized that he couldn’t have recognized Vogelsang in his jumpsuit. He’d probably mistaken him for an escapee from the burn ward or a commando versed in chemical warfare—just another manifestation of the hostile weirdness we’d brought to his sleepy corner of the woods.

We stood beside him now, Vogelsang grinning, Aorta scowling, the water slashing up into the burnt sky and plummeting down to explode in the dust. I felt like a circus animal—tiger,
bear, lion—driven by the whip and making my final approach to the burning hoop. “What in God’s hell is that?” Sapers said finally. He was referring to the plastic pipe, which we’d buried beneath the disused roadway some two weeks earlier. I shrugged. Aorta put her hands on her hips and gave him a why-don’t-you-go-fuck-yourself stare. “Beats me,” Vogelsang said. “Christ, Lloyd, you know I hardly just bought the place—there’s all sorts of surprises here.”

“But, but …” For the first time since I’d had the misfortune of meeting him, Sapers seemed at a loss for words. “But,” he stammered, waving his hand to take in the entire scene, “I been grading this road for twenty years and there’s never been no pipes in here before.”

Vogelsang laughed, a maniacal, wound-up, child-molester’s laugh. “Christ,” he said, repeating himself, as if the invocation of a higher authority could somehow get him off the hook, “I just don’t know how to explain it, Lloyd. It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.” Vogelsang patted frantically at his pockets, searching for the breath neutralizer, which he finally located and used with obvious relief. “I guess we’ll just have to contact the DWP and see what they’ve been doing up here.”

Sapers looked skeptical—he knew as well as I did that the water department had no business out in the hind end of the wilderness, that Vogelsang’s implication was as preposterous and unfounded as if he’d attributed the pipe to Soviet intervention or UFOs. From skepticism, he shifted to suspicion. I could see the change in his face, could see that he was about to say something more, something tougher, something that would poke holes in the entire fabric of lies we’d thrown up to mask our real purpose, when suddenly the gush of water fizzled out. One moment it was spouting like Old Faithful, and the next it was the trickle of a child at a urinal.

“I’ll be damned,” Sapers said.

Vogelsang put on a look of consternation and wonder, a look as phony as mine. The water had given out for a simple and intelligible reason: the pump had shut down. As programmed. We’d gauged the amount of gasoline required to run the pump until all our reservoirs were filled—at that point, the pump ran out of gas and shut itself down.
Chuff-chuff, bang.
Simple as that.

We were standing around scratching our heads when suddenly a shadow fell across my back, and I swung round to confront a dejected Marlon, the thermos wedged beneath one fleshy arm, his eyes red with weeping. Behind us, the earthmover idled with a subdued chuffing roar, its surfaces glistening with water. Vogelsang had stepped forward to make a show of casually tossing the pipe aside, as if it meant nothing in the world to him—as if, like the rocks and trees and insects, it were just another manifestation of the marvelous in an endlessly puzzling universe—and was assuring Sapers that he’d look into the matter and straighten things out with the DWP or “whoever it was that was responsible.” Marlon began to whimper.

“What’s with you?” Sapers snarled.

The boy pointed a thick accusing finger at me. “He … he yelled at me, pop.”

Sapers gave me a quick withering glance, a glance of contempt, hatred and disgust, then shot his eyes at his son. “Aaah, shut yer face, Fathead.” Then he looked at me again, a wicked little grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “So,” he roared, “how’s the writin’ goin’, Shakespeare?”