Budding Prospects (39 page)

Phil and Petra had stopped, too, and were looking back at me questioningly. How many times had I been through this, I wondered, watching the mock-innocent expression hang on Sapers’s face like a kite in the wind, how many times had I played the whipping boy to this crew of in-bred, shit-shoveling, tobacco-chewing rednecks? Things had changed. I’d been through the fire and my life was something new. I jerked my hand away. “What’s it to you?” I said.

“Just asking, that’s all,” Sapers roared as if addressing the entire restaurant. A sly smirk creased the stubble of his cheeks and he licked his lips. “Just being neighborly.”

“You want to be neighborly,” I said, leaning forward and resting my bandaged fists on the edge of the table, “why don’t you come up with some cash to cover your son’s rampage a month and a half ago? Like you promised.”

He was glib, Sapers, chameleonlike, but I had him. His face folded like a lawn chair and he began to fidget in his seat. Marlon, who’d been lustily attacking a double Super Chili Beef Burger in a sea of French fries, reddened and stared down at his plate.

“Come on, Felix,” Phil said. He was standing behind me, the hospital gown tucked into his jeans, impatience hardening his face: he didn’t like Sapers any more than I did.

Sapers was on the defensive now, mumbling something about an operation for Trudy and a stud bull with the bloody scours. I cut him off. “You owe me,” I said.

Through all this, George Pete Turner had been glowering up at me with his wicked slanted vigilante’s eyes, no doubt privately implicating me in the disappearance of his daughter-in-law-to-be and a thousand other crimes, not the least of which was my insistence on continuing to draw breath and occupy space. Now I turned to him, straightened up and folded my arms across my chest. I felt like Shane unleashed, like Kid Lightning, hands wrapped, warming up for the main event. “And you, friend,” I said, “don’t
I owe you
something?”

The question seemed to take him by surprise. He glanced at Phil and then Petra, as if for clarification.

I was a firefighter, a hero, a lover. I looked him in the eye, two feet away, and prodded him: “Like a good shot to the side of the head, maybe?”

“Hey-hey,” Sapers said, roaring again. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”

George Pete was rangy, tough, hard as a knot. He was wearing a plaid shirt, a hand-tooled belt and a string tie. His eyes were the color of water vapor. He didn’t say a word.

“Come on, stand up,” I said. “I’ll take you on right here and now, bandages and all.” I don’t know what had come over me, but I was suddenly hot with outrage, self-righteous as a preacher, vengeful as a man wronged. I was ready to fight to the death, bite the heads off chickens, anything.

A nerve twitched under George Pete’s right eye. Plates rattled and voices hummed around us. Marlon swished the ice in his glass, Sapers was silent. George Pete suddenly became interested in the design of his napkin. “Fine,” I said, and an era had ended. I turned my back on them contemptuously, the matador walking away from a spiritless bull, and led Petra and Phil to a table in the corner.

Something had changed. Some subtle alteration had taken place in the balance of things—I’d cut a new notch in the chain of being, and I could feel all the myriad creatures of the earth, from slippery amoebae and humping earthworms to the hordes of China, shoving over to make room like passengers on a crowded bus. As if in confirmation of this new state of things, the ancient waitress responded instantly to my merest gesture, though the place was packed. She poured us hot coffee, freshly brewed. The food came so quickly I suspected the cook of clairvoyance. It was hot, properly seasoned, tasty. The rolls were airy, the butter firm and pale. Phil and Petra discovered the common ground of sculpture and became fast friends almost instantly. When I looked up, Sapers and his party had vanished.

“No,” Phil was saying, “I haven’t done anything in years.”

“But you wouldn’t catch him dead without his blowtorch,” I said.

Petra smiled. She was wearing white—a peasant blouse, embroidered
gentians twining the sleeves. I watched her lift the sandwich to her mouth, pat her lips with the napkin, and then watched her smile widen like the wake of a sailboat cutting across a flashing depthless sea. When the two highway patrolmen lumbered through the door, keys clanking, gunbelts creaking, and heaved into the booth behind us, I barely glanced up.

Unseasonable, freakish, the rains began in earnest the last week of October. I woke one morning to the sound of rain on the sheet Styrofoam of the roof—it was like the rattling of a snare drum—and to the slow steady drip of the runoff making its way through the seams and spattering the kitchen floor. At first I was elated. Like one of Noah’s unwitting contemporaries on the first blessed day of rain, I thought only of the crops standing tall in the fields, of the even, invigorating, pluvial wash laving leaves, buds, stems, percolating down to the thirsting roots. Lulled by the sweet percussion, I turned over and fell back into my dreams: there would be no need to start up the pump, I thought, not today.

Three days later it was still raining.

Now I woke to the hiss of it as to a pronouncement of doom, thinking of the generations of plowmen gone down, from the Mesopotamians to Virgil’s
agricolae
to the pioneers of the Midwest and their mechanized descendants—tilling, seeding, fertilizing and watering, waiting, praying, sacrificing to the gods—only to wake one morning to the rattle of hail or the cutting rasp of the locusts’ wings. My bed was damp, my clothes damper still. A single day’s rain was cause for celebration, a boon—just the thing to coax the buds into a final pre-harvest frenzy—but this was a disaster. Sodden, the heavy colas would pull the branches down till they snapped, the plants would die premature deaths, the buds would develop mold and wind up tasting like
coffin scrapings. Where was the season of mellow fruitfulness, plumping kernels and deluded bees?

I was making breakfast—fried-egg sandwiches with green salsa and melted jack cheese—when Gesh rumbled down the stairs from the attic like a tree dweller dropping to earth. He was wearing a hooded black sweatshirt and a pair of grease-stiffened corduroys, and he was cursing. The curses were elaborate, heartfelt, rhythmic and persuasive, and they were directed at the weather, at Vogelsang, at the Powers That Be and life in a disappointing and ultimately tragic universe. For five minutes or more he stood at the yellowed front window, hooded like a monk at prayer, cursing into the windowpane. The glass clouded over: it was cold. Once again. And of course we hadn’t laid in even a stick of wood, thinking only of the maturing sun, the crop—attenuated though it was—coming to golden fruition, money in the bank, release, the life of the city. Why stockpile wood against a winter we’d never see?

When Gesh finally joined me at the table, he announced (yet again, litany of disaffection) that he was fed up with the whole thing. I watched as he slathered ketchup on his eggs and thumped the bottom of the salsa bottle. “I mean it,” he said, as if I’d questioned him. “Just get in the truck, drive to Tahoe and forget the whole fucking mess.”

I sympathized with him. Who wouldn’t? I had the same feelings myself. But I was determined to see those plants harvested if I had to do it in a boat. Alone. With both hands manacled behind my back and Jerpbak circling overhead in a helicopter. It was no longer a question of money (the crop had been so decimated we’d be lucky to wind up with a fraction of even our most despairing estimate), reason (if I’d been reasonable I would have been sitting in front of the stove in Petra’s kitchen) or pride—no, it went deeper than that. Call it stubbornness, call it stupidity. I was beyond caring. Grim as the shipwrecked fanatic who survives six weeks on the open sea only to be offered rescue within sight of shore, I was determined to stick it out to the end. “Maybe we ought to go out there and check on the plants,” I said. “Or give Dowst a call.”

“Fuck Dowst,” Gesh said. Predictably.

A muted subaqueous glow drained the room of light until it
began to feel like a dungeon. Behind me there was the steady syncopation of the water dripping from the ceiling into pots, pans and buckets. The kitchen smelled like a mushroom cellar.

I was thinking that phoning Dowst wouldn’t be such a bad idea—especially as it would give me an excuse to drop in on Petra as long as I was in town—when Phil emerged from the shadowy depths of his room as if from the Black Hole of Calcutta. His eyes were watery and flecked with red, his bandages dirty. A joint glowed in his hand and a haze of marijuana smoke seemed to seep from his ears and cling like a phantom to the shorn crown of his head (he’d been sedating himself diligently since the fire—to ease the smart of his burns, he insisted—but changing the bandages far less faithfully). “Morning,” he said, shuffling across the room to the stove, where he fired up all four burners and held his hands out flat as if he were roasting weiners. We watched him pour himself a cup of coffee, cradle it in his hands, blow on it and take a tentative sip, watched with open-mouthed concentration, as if we’d never before seen so subtle and astonishing a feat. “What about it,” he said finally, swinging around to face us. “The weather stinks, Vogelsang’s a liar and I’m the mummy’s ghost. Let’s get stoned.”

Stoned, straight, drunk, sober: it didn’t make a shred of difference. “Why not?” I said.

We mopped up our eggs and then huddled over the stove, glumly sharing a joint, gearing ourselves up for yet another critical decision. (We were smoking our own product now, heady stuff—shake leaves from fourteen-foot female plants with colas the size of nightsticks. The leaves were so saturated with resin they stuck to your fingers like flypaper.) We drank coffee, smoked a bit more, stood around staring off into space. Then, as if at a given signal, we shrugged into our rain gear and trundled out into the downpour to make the rounds and assess the damage.

Outside, water had begun to collect beneath the gutted storage shed and in a wide scimitar-shaped depression in the front yard. The Jeep, which hadn’t run in a month, sloped forward in a reddish pool that already threatened to engulf the front bumper. There was no wind, no slant to the rain, no indication that the storm was moving on. Clouds clung to the earth as if strangling it, the main drive had reverted to its primitive state—i.e., it was
a riverbed—and a network of parched gullies that were nothing more than scars in the dust suddenly churned with angry, braided streams. It was March all over again.

We trudged down the road to the Jonestown growing area—the only one that ultimately produced anything—and fought our way through the dripping undergrowth to the rat-trap-strewn enclosure we’d thrown up in the vain hope of protecting our crop from the quick-toothed vandals of the wood. Our plants—what was left of them—had been doing well, flowering for better than a month now, putting out buds on top of buds. This was the climactic growth we’d been waiting for, fey, penultimate, triggered by the autumnal equinox and the declining days that succeeded it. Dowst had been busy throughout September, identifying and eliminating the male plants, foiling nature. I’d watched as he cut down one healthy plant after another—each the culmination of months of coolie labor, of digging, hauling, fertilizing, watering—and tossed them aside to decompose. It hurt. But it was necessary. Frustrated, aching, desperate for completion, the females spread themselves ever more luxuriously, the flowers swelling, growing sweeter, more resinous and potent; budding more and still more, our harvest battened on the vine.

Now we stood confused amid the apparent ruins of it. Raindrops tapped at our backs like insinuating fingers, water puddled the ground, streamed from our hats and shoulders. The trees drooped like old men with back problems, the fierce jungle smell of ripe pot stunned the air, raw and chlorophyllific; the carcass of a rat lay twisted and dumb-staring in a trap at my feet. None of us had been out of the house since the rains had begun, and we weren’t quite prepared for the transformation they’d wrought. Whereas three days earlier we’d been tending plants twelve and fourteen feet tall with branches arching toward the sun like candelabra, now we were confronted with broken limbs, splayed growth, the declining curve. Fully half the plants had ruptured under the water-heavy burden of the flower bracts, and all were bent like sunflowers after a frost. In the lower corner of the plot I found a six-inch cola—prime buds—immersed in a soup of reddish mud. It was as if someone had gone through the field with a saber, swiping randomly at stem, branch, leaf and bud. My thoughts were gradual. Still stoned, I looked round me
in a slow pan—everything seemed to be moving, divided into beads of color, as if I were looking through a microscope. Somehow my heartbeat seemed to have lodged in my brain.

“What now?” Phil was standing at my side, Mr. Potatohead, carrot nose and cherry tomato eyes. The rain thrashed the trees like a monsoon in Burma.

“I don’t know,” I said.

So much water was streaming from my hat I had to turn my head and look sideways to see him. We might as well have been hooked to the conveyor track in a car wash. “This could go on forever,” he said.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Anything positive, that is.

“So what do we do?” he said. “Wait and hope it clears up, try to harvest now, or what?”

It was a resonant question, pithy, full of meat and consequence, the question I’d been asking myself for the past several minutes. “We call the expert,” I said.

Half an hour later, after schussing down the driveway in the Toyota, fighting erratic windshield wipers and skirting Shirelle’s Bum Steer, Phil, Gesh and I crowded into a phone booth at a Shell station just outside Willits and phoned Dowst. I did the talking.

“Hello, Boyd?”

A pause. I could picture him hunching over his typewriter in a glen plaid shirt, sipping hot chicken-noodle soup and typing out his notes on the wild onion or the water wattle. “Christ, I thought you guys would never call,” he said. “What’s going on up there?”

“It’s raining.”