Budding Prospects (33 page)

It’s hard to say exactly how it happened. Gesh was on his knees, swinging mechanically, Vogelsang struggling to ward off the blows and Dowst leaning forward clumsily to snatch at Gesh’s collar like a teacher in the schoolyard. Then suddenly Vogelsang was free and scrambling to his feet while Dowst hit the wall again and Gesh rose from the floor like a wounded bear. “Gesh!” I shouted, and I understood in that instant that I was cheering him on, goading him, backing him, calling out his name in partisanship and affirmation as the ranks of hometown fans call out the single name of the champion stepping up to bat. For them. For us. Gesh moved forward, huge, the street fighter, the brawler, blood on his knuckles.

I glanced at Vogelsang. His face showed nothing. His right eye was swollen and there was a thread of blood at the corner of his mouth. The .44, swift death, steel in an arena of flesh, clung to his hip. He ignored it. Instead, he cocked his open hands in the kung fu pyramid and stepped forward.

“No!” I shouted.

“Vogelsang!” Dowst called.

It was so quick. So quick I barely saw it. Gesh swung, Vogelsang parried the blow and caught him twice in the throat with the flat of his hand and then struck him in the groin with an exploding foot. As Gesh pitched forward, Vogelsang’s knee went to the small of his back and I could hear the chiropractor’s crack as he jerked Gesh’s head back in the Montagnard death grip. And then, before I could realize what was happening, Phil was up off the couch with the misaligned .22 in his hand and I was flinging up my elbow to deflect his aim—too far, this had gone too far—when we all stopped dead at the sound of Aorta’s voice.

She hadn’t screamed—no, it was far more chilling than that. “Oh, my God,” she said, and it cut like a knife to the core of everything we were—stark, animal, squeal of bushpig, howl of monkey—and we understood somehow that the words had no reference to the silly morality play we were enacting. We looked up—all of us, even Vogelsang, even Gesh. Looked up and saw that there was a face in the kitchen window, framed against the darkening sky. Round and huge, moonlike, a face, watching us.

The fire put things in perspective. It came like a judgment, singeing, cleansing, burning with a pure, fatal, almost mystic candescence, eating away at the old growth of our baited lives to make way for the new. Immediate, deadly, it put us back in touch with ourselves. If we’d sat around the stove on a rainy spring night and traded tales of cheating death, now we fought for our lives. We burned. Inhaled smoke, rubbed our eyes raw. We dropped into the inferno and emerged again. Singed. Cleansed. Alive.

It was a stifling, bone-dry night in early October, a month from harvest (with hope, fear and a nod to the demons, we’d chosen my birthday, circled in black on the apocalyptic calendar, for the day we would reap what we’d sown). Gesh was gone, damping his inner fires in the anodynic embrace of Tahoe Nelda, and Phil and I were sitting up late—well past midnight—drinking big glasses of vodka and tonic, smoking pot and playing pitch. The fuel in the ancient Coleman lantern was burning low. I shuffled the cards. All the world was as hushed as if it were about to plunge into eternity.

Phil took the bid, and I could tell he had a killer hand by the way he let his eye wander casually over the room (he was contemplating the appointments, struck with the smart conjunction of couch, armchair and splintered end table, cards the furthest thing from his mind). He threw the queen of spades (the son of a bitch, I knew he had the king and jack back there, too), just
as the lamp began to flicker. “Damn,” he said, raking in my deuce and slapping down the king. The light was fading fast. I studied his king for a long palpitating moment, as though debating the loss of another point card, and then with a grin laid down the ace. Of spades. “I’ll get it,” Phil said, jumping up to refill the lantern. “Make me another drink, will you?”

I got up and shuffled to the cooler in darkness as Phil fumbled for the flashlight, snatched the lantern from the table and hurried out the door. Ice. I pawed around, dropped some cubes in a pair of fresh glasses and felt the house rock gently as Phil thumped across the porch. CAUTION: DO NOT REFILL WHEN HOT, warned the inscription on the base of the lantern. I poured from bottles.
Glug-glug-glug.
Outside were the stars, the trees, the endless blanched hills. I settled in the darkness, drink in hand, and listened to the slow weary moan of the storage shed door as it pulled back on its hinges.

In August, I never thought I’d see September on the farm, let alone October. Any shred of hope I may have nurtured after the earlier disappointments—the reemergence of Jerpbak, my confinement to the property, the ongoing decimation of the crop—was dashed by the leapfrogging catastrophes of that nightmarish two-day period at the end of the month. In the space of just over thirty hours I’d managed to rearouse the viper’s pit of the Bum Steer, alienate Petra, sully Jerpbak’s mother, feel the pinch of Jones, witness the eruption of physical conflict between my partners and experience the onset of cardiac arrest in the terrible moment in which Aorta had gasped and I looked up to see that leering face in the window. Was ever man so beset by demons? I was ready to hang it up, flay myself through the streets, run to the authorities and turn myself in: I saw that face in the window and knew we’d reached the end. But here it was October, and we were alive and well and unincarcerated, and looking forward to reaping not thorns but dollars.

We’d been spared. For the moment, at any rate. The great jaws had come near, gaping so that all we could see was the darkness within, and then they’d rushed on by to gobble up some other luckless creature while we bobbed helplessly in the
wake. August had left us with two choices: run or stay. If we ran, we would take next to nothing with us, the plants having barely begun to bud. If we stayed, we faced loss, disorder, sorrow and ruination. We stayed. Through inertia more than anything else. We were stuck in gear, crushed by indecision and apathy, unable to throw down our shovels and hoses no matter what the cost. Like the mule that goes on pulling its cart after the muleskinner drops dead of sunstroke, we went on. Out of necessity. Out of boredom, fatigue, confusion. Out of habit.

It was in this state that we awaited Jones. We waited through that long Tuesday, Phil, Gesh and I (Dowst and Vogelsang had vanished, of course), waited grimly, heroically, waited like prisoners on death row. Jones wanted ten thousand. Between us we had sixteen dollars and forty-two cents. Noon came and went. No Jones. We were puzzled, anxious. Had he gone to the police after all? Had he forgotten the whole thing? Had he died and gone to hoods’ heaven? Night fell. We sat in darkness so we could see him approaching. We emptied half a gallon of vodka. Gesh smoked two packs of cigarettes. Jones didn’t show. By the third or fourth day the tension began to ease, and we forgot him for minutes at a time as we went about our chores and fought the tedium with the usual round of drinks, bombers, cheap paperbacks, tortured naps, horseshoes, Monopoly and cards.

A week after the appointed date, we were jolted from our postprandial torpor by the throaty roar of a foreign car negotiating the hill. I looked into my co-workers’ eyes and saw fear, despair and resignation. We shuffled outside and stood in a grim knot on the porch. We weren’t running. I chewed my lip and watched the trees for the first heartless red flash of Jones’s MG. Phil began to whistle tunelessly. As the sound of the engine grew closer, I began to whistle, too.
Oh, Susannah
, I whistled,
don’t you cry for me
, but then Vogelsang’s Saab rounded the corner and lurched into the field, and I felt as if I’d been resurrected from the dead.

Unfortunately, the appearance of Vogelsang’s Saab did not necessarily indicate the appearance of Vogelsang (though we didn’t realize it at the time, he’d already paid his final visit to the summer camp). Aorta was alone. We watched as she slid out of the car and made her sinuous way toward us, a flat white
envelope clutched in her hand. “Hi,” she said, her face as expressionless as the late Mao Tse-tung’s. I saw that she’d dyed her hair anew: a two-inch azure stripe now ran from her brow to the nape of her neck, giving her the look of some bush creature, some weirdly striped antelope or prowling cat. “Vogelsang said to give this to you.”

“Where is he?” Gesh demanded. “What’s he doing about all this shit that’s coming down?”

“Jones never showed,” I said.

She glanced up at me, then focused on the crumpled Pennzoil can at my feet. “We know,” she murmured. “Read the letter.” And then, as if she were messenger to a colony of lepers, she turned to hurry off before we could contaminate her.

I tore open the envelope, which bore my name across the front in the blocky misaligned characters kidnappers clip from magazines in gangster movies. The letter inside was pasted up in the same way:

Phil and Gesh read over my shoulder.

“Five thousand bucks,” Phil said. “Ouch.”

“I’d kill him for five hundred,” Gesh muttered, and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to Jones or Vogelsang.

“What enclosure?” I said.

The car door slammed.
Vroom
, the engine turned over with a low sucking moan.
Vroom-vroom.
I glanced up, noting absently that Vogelsang had removed the license plates, than bent for the
crumpled envelope. Inside, equally crumpled, was a newspaper clipping. LOCAL GIRL MISSING, I read.
Savoy Skaggs, 17, a June graduate of Willits High School and a resident at 1990 Covelo Road …
No, it couldn’t be, I thought, the moment poetry, sweet as revenge, victory, the beatific light that shines on the darkest hour. …
no leads … investigating the possibility
… Of course, of course. She’s run off to consort with Eugene, suave and irresistible offshoot of G. P. Turner, the gentleman pugilist. I pictured her hitchhiking to Wiesbaden, thumb out, skirt hiked, sick to death of being a conniving country bitch and bar slut, hastening to marry off her little mangoes before they rotted. Love conquers all.

My comrades were frowning over the letter. The Saab had begun to creep forward. “Hey, look at this!” I shouted, nearly whooping with the joy of it and waving the newsprint like a flag at a parade. But then I stopped cold:
investigating the possibility of foul play.
Foul play?

Suddenly I was running. “Stop!” I shouted. “Wait up!” Aorta was still in first gear, taking it easy over hummock and hump, but picking up speed. Something snatched at my foot. I went on, shouting, waving my arms. I caught her as she was swinging onto the road.

There was a whine of brake discs, the car humped forward and then back, dust rose. Aorta looked alarmed. “What? What’s the matter?”

I thrust my face in the window, dripping sweat. “Vogelsang.” I gasped, lungs heaving, air too thick to swallow. “He didn’t have anything to do with this? He didn’t …?”

Aorta’s face was white, ghoulish, the eyes sunk deep in her head. Zombies, I thought. Murderers. Kidnappers. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

Exhaust bit at my throat, dust settled on my forearm. I noticed the license plates on the seat beside her. “Savoy, Vogelsang wouldn’t have, have done anything, would he?”

She made a heroic attempt at working incredulity into her face, slash eyebrows lifting a degree, eyes fighting for the ironic glance. “Don’t be silly,” she said, her voice tinny as a party horn. She goosed the gas pedal. “Of course not,” she said, eyes forward, and then she popped the clutch and shot off down the
road. I stood there, inhaling dust that tasted like ashes and wondering just how much all this would redound to my future happiness and well-being.

Then there was the face in the window.

It was a large face, pale and childish, tapering at the brow and expanding like a prize eggplant in the region of the jowl. Above, there was a bristle of close-cropped hair and a long-billed cap; below, a congeries of chins. When I recovered from my initial shock, I realized that the face belonged not to a sheriff’s deputy, spare extortionist or special investigator from the DEA, but to our own witless, puerile and very likely subhuman neighbor, Marlon Sapers. Who else?

“Oh, my God,” Aorta had said, and we’d frozen in our worst moment, the moment of our dissolution and grief. Vogelsang had Gesh in a lethal chokehold, I was wrestling the .22 from Phil, Dowst was shouting, Aorta gasping, garbage climbed the walls as if it were alive and chaos roared in our ears. Phil was the first to react. He swung the rifle around like a skeetshooter and took out the upper left panel of the window as neatly as if he were potting a clay pigeon.
Pow
! The face disappeared from the window, Vogelsang sprang up as if he’d been scalded, Gesh struggled unsteadily to his feet, Dowst hit the floor. Looking pleased with himself, looking as if he’d just solved the better portion of the world’s problems in a single flamboyant stroke, Phil lowered the gun. It was then that I made the association between those fleshy befuddled features and Sapers’s son and heir, and I called out his name in shocked reproof. “Marlon!” I cried. “You come back here!”

The next thing I remember, Vogelsang and I were crashing through the scrub behind the house, pursuing Marlon. What we intended to do with him once we caught him was a question that begged further consideration. We didn’t stop to consider.

To his distress, Marlon was not built for flight. Clumsy, lumbering, reeling from the shock of discovery and rattled by the deadly crack of the gun, he lurched blindly through the brush, heading first in one direction, then another. We caught up with him between the storage shed and the propane tank. Perceiving our closeness, he turned at bay, a frantic, crazed, trapped-beast sort of look in the eyes that loomed huge behind the thick lenses
of his glasses. “Go away!” he screamed, his body shuddering under the force of conflicting impulses and aberrant emotions. “Leave me alone!” I pulled up short, half a dozen feet from him, but Vogelsang, caught up in the chase and the bloodlust of his clash with Gesh, dove for his legs like a tackier.