Budding Prospects (30 page)

I looked around me. The heifer bacchanal was in full swing, heads, shoulders, torsos and hips flailing in time to the music, feet shuffling and legs kicking, incisors tearing, molars champing, throats gulping—beef, beef, beef—as the smoke rose to the sky and abandoned shrieks cut through the steady pounding din of the drums. To the left of the dancers was the barbecue pit, which I would have to negotiate on my way to the beer booth, and beyond that the appalling dark entrance of the bar.

I began to maneuver my way through the crowd, thinking of Petra’s blue shorts and the couch at the summer camp, when someone set off a string of firecrackers and fifty hats sailed into the air accompanied by a chorus of yips and yahoos. Ducking hats and elbows, clutching the plastic cups in one hand and
extending the other to forestall interference, I snaked through the mass of carnivorous bodies at the barbecue pit and was just closing in on my destination when a two-hundred-pound blonde in pigtails and a fringed Dale Evans outfit stepped in front of me and asked if I wanted to dance.

“Dance?” I repeated, stupefied. But before I could go into my hard-of-hearing-with-a-touch-of-brain-damage routine, she jerked my arm like a puppy’s leash, spun me around and propelled me toward the dance floor. This was no time for argument: I danced. She pressed me to her—breasts like armaments, big grinding hips—then made the mistake of releasing my hand as she fell into momentary rapture over the musical miracle of her own rhythmically heaving body, and I dodged behind a barefoot lumberjack with beard, belly and ratchetting beads, and clawed my way to the beer booth.

The bartender had his back to me, bending to crack a fresh keg. “Two beers,” I said. “When you get a chance.” I stole a look over my shoulder to see if my dancing partner had missed me, but there was no sign of her. I was safe. I would give the dance floor a wide berth on the way back, hand Petra her beer and then suggest that we go to my place—or rather her place. Yes, that’s what I’d do. We’d been here long enough, I’d taken foolish risks, and now it was time for my reward.

Absently, I studied the work-hardened hands of the bartender as he positioned the spigot over the cork, screwed the collar tight and rammed the plunger home. Somewhere behind me a raft of firecrackers snapped and stuttered. And then, in the half-conscious way we register minor changes in our environment, I saw that this bartender, with his sun-ravaged neck, graying hair and outsized ears, was not the good-natured cowboy of two and a half hours ago, but someone else altogether, someone who from this angle almost looked … familiar.

Before I could make the connection, Lloyd Sapers spun around, spigot in hand, and said, “Two beers coming up.” The beer was already hissing into the first cup, yellow as bile, when he glanced up and found himself staring into my stricken face. There was a moment of shocked recognition during which his eyes fell back into his head and his lower jaw dropped open to reveal teeth worn to nubs and a lump of shit-colored tobacco, and then his
face lit with a sort of malicious joy. “Well, Christ-ass, if it isn’t Ernest Hemingway. Gettin’ a bit dry up there on the mountain, hey?”

My first impulse was to laugh in his face in an explosion of nerves, like the killer at the denouement of a Sherlock Holmes movie (
Ha! You’ve caught me! Ha-Ha! Yes, yes: I did it! I killed her! Choked her with my own hands, I did. Ha! Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha! Ha!
). Fortunately, I was able to stifle that impulse. What I did manage to do, after struggling to get a grip on myself, was force my face into the jocular it-wasn’t-me expression of a good ole boy caught in a minor but quintessentially manly transgression. “You know how it is,” I said, grinning sheepishly, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“Don’t I know it,” he roared and nearly choked on his own laughter. I watched as the level of beer rose in the second cup, already shifting my weight to turn and make my escape, when he leaned forward and said, “You didn’t bring that big fella with you, did you? The one that shoved me around?”

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said, dropping his voice from the usual roar. His straw hat was askew and he smelled as if he’d been dipped in used Kitty Litter. “I don’t like him,” he said confidentially, capping off the beer with a crown of foam. “The man just ain’t neighborly.”

I hooked two fingers over the lips of the plastic cups, preparatory to lifting them from the table and making my exit, but Sapers wouldn’t release them. Held fast, I could only mumble something to the effect that Gesh was sometimes hard to get along with.

“Ha!” Sapers bellowed. “Now that’s an understatement.” And then he snatched the beers from my grasp and swished them in the dust; “You got a couple of chewed-up cups there, friend—what’d you do, pick ’em up off the ground?”

“No, I—”

“Here,” he said, producing clean cups and clicking them down on the table, “I’ll fix you up with some fresh ones,” and I watched as he prolonged my agony by pumping up the keg and meticulously tipping each cup to accept a slow steady stream of headless beer. I was sweating. I closed my eyes a moment and watched
a dance of red and green paremecia on the underside of my eyelids. “Here you go,” Sapers said, and pushed the two full beers toward me.

Could it be this easy? I reached for the beers, about to thank him and go, when he ducked his head slyly, spat out a stream of saliva and tobacco juice and said, “So I hear you boys been doin’ a little gardenin’ up there. …”

I stood stock-still, my hands arrested, like a man at a picnic who glances up from his sandwich to find a two-inch hornet circumnavigating his head. Sapers was regarding me steadily, his eyes keen and intent. I remembered that first morning in the cabin, the way he’d dropped the mask of the yokel for just an instant and the foreboding I’d felt. He was clever, he was dangerous, he bore us ill will. And I was half drunk. As nonchalantly as I could, I lifted one of the beers to my lips, took a swallow and said, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Marlon,” he said, blinking innocently, the hick again. “He says you got all these drums of water and hoses and—”

I cut him off. “Marlon?” Illumination came in a rush: the big lumbering half-wit had been spying on us, slipping through the woods like a cousin to the bear, fingering our hoses and sniffing our plants. “You mean he’s …?” I couldn’t quite frame the words.

Sapers looked apologetic. “Oh, listen, I hope you and your friends’ll understand—the boy’s a bit, you know,” he said, tapping a gnarled finger to the side of his head. “He don’t mean no harm.”

“But our place is private property—we’ve got signs up all over the place.” My voice was a squeal of outrage. “Vogelsang would hit the ceiling if he heard about this.”

Sapers spat again, then picked up my beer and took a long swallow. “Aw, come on,” he said, “it’s no big deal, is it? What have you got to hide?”

“Nothing,” I said, too quickly. “But it’s the principle. You see, Vogelsang’s afraid somebody’ll get hurt on the property and sue him—he’s got a real hang-up about it. And Gesh, you know how Gesh is.” I shrugged. “Me, I could care less. I mean, shit, we’ve got nothing to hide.”

Sapers was watching me like a predator, no hint of amusement
in his face. “So what have you got in the ground over there anyways—sweet corn?”

What was he doing—playing games? Making me squirm? I didn’t know what to think—maybe I was having a paranoid episode and he knew nothing at all—but at least I had the presence of mind to play along. “What else?” I said, as if in epicurean contemplation of that succulent, many-kerneled farinaceous vegetable. “Nothing but cattle corn in the supermarket, right?”

Sapers was impassive, his face locked like a vault.

“Of course, we’re growing other stuff, too—for the exercise, you know? Beets, celery, cucumbers, succotash—you name it.”

Stroking his chin thoughtfully, Sapers shifted the wad of tobacco from his left cheek to his right. “The only reason I ask is because I been havin’ the devil of a time with the coons this year—for every ear they eat they spoil five. They hittin’ you pretty hard, too?”

“No,” I said. “I mean yes. Or we didn’t know it was coons. Something’s been getting into the garden, anyway—Phil thought it was bears.” I chortled at the absurdity of it, but the joke fell flat. Something made me glance to my right at that instant, and I saw to my alarm that I was flanked by the immensity of Marlon and the wiry whiskery spring-coiled figure of George Pete Turner.

Marlon was wearing a dirty white T-shirt maculated with barbecue sauce, in the tenuous grip of which the great naked ball of his belly hung like a wad of soggy newsprint. He clutched a two-quart plastic bottle of Safeway cola in one hand and held a red helium balloon—HEIFER HIJINKS, WILLITS, CA—in the other. When he saw that my attention was focused on him, his eyes rushed round the thick lenses of his wire-framed glasses and he giggled.

George Pete Turner glared at me out of red-flecked eyes, then took a hit from a pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad. The last time I’d seen him he’d punched me in the side of the head. I looked from him to Sapers and then back again. “They let just about any scum in here, don’t they?” George Pete observed, staring down at my shoes.

“Well,” I said, an easy little chuckle breaking up the mellifluous double
l
s (who was I to take offense, the whole thing just a harmless little joke, a wisecrack, wit, persiflage, that’s all). I
followed this with “Heh-heh” as a sort of bridge, raised my hand in a quick farewell and ducked away, abandoning the beers.

It was at this point, nearly panicked now, running scared, that I found myself making eye contact with the big blonde in the Dale Evans outfit. Though I immediately glanced away, I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was making her way toward me through the crowd. I had nowhere to turn. Sapers behind me, the she-woman in front of me, the pit to my left and the dark portals of Shirelle’s to my right. If in such situations the hearts of heroes expand to enable them to flail their enemies into submission, tuck heroines under their arms and swing to safety via conveniently placed gymnasium ropes, then I benefited at that moment from a similarly expanding organ—that is, my bladder. All at once my body spoke to me with an urgency that was not to be denied. I took a deep breath and plunged toward the shadowy entrance of the bar and the rushing release of the men’s room that lay beyond it.

I was met by the roar of electric fans, a clamor of chaotic voices, and darkness. After the steady, harsh, omnipresent glare of the summer sun, the darkness here seemed absolute, impenetrable, the darkness of mushroom cellars, crypts, spelunkers’ dreams. I edged out of the doorway in the direction of the bar, feeling my way through the pillars of flesh and barking drunken voices until my eyes began to adjust. The place, I saw, was packed. People pressed up against the bar, stood in tight howling groups with cocktails clenched in their hands, sat six or eight to a table tearing at ribs and hoisting pitchers of margaritas. For some reason—temperature control? atmosphere?—the curtains were drawn and candles glimmered from the tables. I stood there a moment, tentative, my shoulders drawn in, a canny old quarterback scouting the defensive line. Then my bladder goaded me and I started across the room.

Unfortunately, a great bleary white-haired hulk of a man in denim jacket and string tie chose that moment to lurch back and deliver the punch line of a joke with a lusty guffaw and an emphatic stamp of his rattlesnake-hide boot. The emphatic stamp caught me across the bridge of my right foot as the jokester’s audience exploded in laughter. “Excuse me,” I murmured, backing off, when I felt a pressure on my arm and swung round to
stare bewildered into Savoy’s foxy triangular little face. “Hi,” she said. “Long time no see.”

Something caught in my throat.

“Felix, right?” she said, treating me to a blinding, full-face smile. I felt like a prisoner of painted savages running the gauntlet over a trench of hot coals—reeling from one blow, I pitched face forward into the stinging slap of the next. I watched numbly as she fished a pack of cigarettes from a tiny sequined purse, shook one free and lit it.

“I was just going to the men’s room,” I said.

Savoy breathed smoke in my face. “So how do you like the party?” she said, ignoring me. The smile was fixed on her lips, as empty and artificial as the smile of a president’s wife or a dime-store mannequin, but effective all the same. I didn’t want to be within six miles of her, the pressure on my bladder was like a knife in the groin, I was in trouble, out of luck and I’d begun to feel queasy, and yet still that smile spoke to me of erotic delights unfolding like the petals of a flower. “You’ve got to admit,” she said, pulling the cigarette from her mouth to nudge me and emit a chummy little giggle, “the place is shit-for-sure livelier than usual.”

I had to admit it. But my stomach plunged like an elevator out of control and the ocean of beer I’d consumed was, according to the first law of gastrophysics, seeking an outlet. I belched.

This was hilarious. She clapped her hands and laughed aloud, as if I’d just delivered an epigram worthy of Oscar Wilde. “Far out,” she gasped, still laughing. “I know what you mean.” Then she gave me that beaming, wide-eyed, candid look and took my hand. “Listen,” she said, “I’m over here at the bar. Why don’t you come and join me for a minute so I can buy you a drink and introduce you to a few friends?”

Introduce me? This was the girl who had turned to me with the same smile, the same seductive eyes and insouciant breasts and announced, as if she were giving me an injection, that she had us cold.
Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there.
I pulled away. “No, no,” I said, “I’ve got to go, really,” knowing that she was poison, that she was out to trip me up, that her eyes were trepans and her smile a snare.

“Oh, come on,” she said, tugging my hand as insistently as the big blonde had. “One little drink.”

The flesh is weak, but the mind is weaker. I followed her.

We made our way through the crowd—men in wide-brimmed felt hats, women in print dresses clutching patent-leather purses—to the only unoccupied bar stool in the place. Two women—one middle-aged, the other about thirty—flanked the empty stool like sentinels. They smiled in unison as Savoy led me up to them.