Budding Prospects (7 page)

Inside, it was worse. The roof leaked in eight places, the front door had blown in and torn back from its hinges, a furious collision of sumac and vetch darkened the windows. I dropped my duffel bag on the cracked linoleum floor (a floral pattern popular in the forties), and walked round the main room as if I were touring a museum. The room was L-shaped, roughly divided into kitchen and parlor. I paused over the .22 holes in the kitchen wall, the gas-powered refrigerator that had been nonfunctional for thirty years, the sink stained with the refuse of forgotten meals. There were two small bedrooms off the parlor, and a crude staircase that led to a third in the attic. The kitchen door gave onto a partially enclosed porch that connected with a dilapidated storage shed. Beyond the storage shed, a rust-pitted propane tank (Pro-Flame) and a grim, tree-choked ravine. I took all this in, shivering, and then turned to the stove.

There were two stoves, actually. One was a range—combination gas and wood, circa 1935—and the other was a squat wood stove made of cast iron. There was no wood. All the clothes I owned were soaked through, my shoulders had begun to quake involuntarily, I was exhaling clouds. Something had to be done. Beyond the brown windows lay 390 acres of pine, hardwood and scrub, every stick of it wet as a sponge. I pictured myself back out in that dripping tangle, snapping off branches and peeling back strips of sodden bark, and dissolved the image as abruptly as I might have switched channels on the TV. Then I thought of the storage room, and slammed through the kitchen door in a rush, inadvertently flushing a bird that had been roosting in the porch beams. It flew up in my face like a bad dream, and then it was gone.

The storage room was penumbral, cluttered with refuse. There were bundles of yellowed newspaper (
TRUMAN
CALLS
FOR
FAIR
DEAL
;
DIMAGGIO
UNRAVELS
SOX
), staved-in gasoline cans and remnants of what might once have been a hand loom. I stepped into the low-ceilinged room as I might have stepped into Pharaoh’s tomb, treading carefully, keeping an eye out for lucre—or rather, in this case, the merest splinter of anything combustible—among
the heaps of rags, cans and bottles that flowed across the floor and slapped at the walls like the spillage of some diluvian tide. Dust lay over everything, white as pulverized bone. When I snapped a chair leg across my knee, a pair of sleek dark forms shot through the jagged window on the near side of the room. Rats, I thought absently—or maybe ground squirrels. Five minutes later I had a respectable pile of furniture fragments and odd pieces of lumber. I set it atop a bundle of mildewed newspaper, hauled the whole mess back into the main room, checked the flue on the stovepipe, and realized I didn’t have any matches.

This was too much. I cursed. Kicked something. And then threw myself down on the stinking sun-faded sofa opposite the cold stove. Dust rose in a mighty swirling mushroom cloud and settled on my wet jacket. For a while I just sat there shivering, listening to the rain percolate through the ceiling and spatter the ancient linoleum, the storm laying down a screen of static outside. Then I heard the laboring engine of Phil’s pickup, churning its way up the mountain. They were in for a surprise, I thought, lifting myself from the sofa and gazing out through the open door at the raked and rugged hills, the trees like claws, the gray distance that couldn’t begin to suggest the gaps between ridges.

Impatient, jittery, wet to the bone, I paced the room half a dozen times and then thought of looking over the bedrooms again, with an eye to staking a claim on one of them. The nearest was unremarkable: four walls, crudely done (some misguided soul had attempted to put up slabs of sheetrock and had given up halfway through the job), a torn mattress set atop a boxspring, a broom handle nailed diagonally across the far corner to serve as a clothing rack. I moved past it, down the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom, and then into the back bedroom. It was as spare and Essene as the first. The walls were pine slats, there was a boxspring propped up on wooden packing crates, an unfinished window looked out on the trees. At first I almost missed the calendar nailed to the inside of the door. But the door swung to on uneven hinges, and when I turned, it was staring me in the face.

A calendar. I could hear the pickup rattling into the yard, the engine wheezing like a miler’s lungs. The picture over the month-and-date portion of the calendar featured a woman in a cloche
hat, her face averted, skirt pinched to reveal her legs—a dull, brownish, Norman Rockwell sort of thing. But it wasn’t the picture that caught my eye. It was the year—1949, the year I was born. Odd, I thought, and then I noticed the month. November. My month. I could feel the blood rushing to my stomach, as if I’d been hit in the midsection, the impossible, nagging cosmic joke of it, the heavy black pencil strokes an act of the will, irrefutable, closing in on the very day. My day. My birthday. Circled in black.

I stepped back involuntarily. “Hey, Felix!” Gesh was shouting from the front room. “You in there?” It was one of those moments that annihilate a lifetime of empirical assumptions with a sudden mocking laugh. “Felix!” Gesh shouted. I stepped back another pace, as bewildered and disoriented as if I’d just been slapped.

Something was wrong here, and I didn’t like it. From childhood I’d been taught that there were answers for everything, that the square root of four was two, that the sky was blue because of the diffraction of light through dust particles in the atmosphere, that life originated from the action of an electrical charge on simple proteins. I was not superstitious. Like anyone else, I knew that in an infinite and multifarious universe, the most bizarre coincidences were commonplace, were calculable probabilities. Nonetheless, I wanted to quit. Right then, right there, my face smarting and heart hammering, I wanted to quit.

Let me tell you about dirt.

Brown dirt, red dirt, black dirt, yellow dirt. Dirt that sucks at your shoes, blackens your fingernails and seams the creases of your hands, dirt that dries to dust on the faded linoleum and settles in your lungs at night. Friable dirt, liquid dirt, dirt clods, bombs and bricks, sandy dirt, loamy dirt, dirt that reeks of corruption and slow rot. Dirt. The foundation of all things, the beginning and the end. We are made of dirt, not water, and in dirt we shall lie. At the summer camp we ate dirt, washed with dirt, slept in dirt in dirty sleeping bags; at the summer camp, no doubt about it, we lived close to the soil.

You don’t encounter true dirt in the city, with its shoulder-to-shoulder buildings, its cement and its blacktop. But it is there—down in the sub-basement like a nasty primordial secret, clenched in the strangled roots of the trees, crushed beneath the heaving floor of the Bay itself. Dirt is problematic in the city, an element you perceive theoretically, intellectually. You don’t become aware of it on the experiential level until you dive for a Frisbee on the tame suburban grass of Golden Gate Park, and there it is—dirt—on the calf of your white pegged jeans. Or you come down in the morning to find minuscule grains of black dust on the windshield of your car, or take a stroll past a building site and see some actual raw hard-core dirt exposed like a cavity in a rotten tooth. Dirt, you say to yourself, how about that? Still, it’s an anomaly, an exception to the rule. You think about air in
the city. You think about water, gasoline, broken glass and dog shit. But not dirt. Dirt just isn’t relevant.

It was relevant that first night at the summer camp.

We found ourselves in the purlieus of nowhere, cold, hungry, exhausted and wet, our hair, skin and clothing layered with mud, which is of course simply protean dirt. Disappointment choked us. Weltschmerz glinted in our eyes. Our hands were black as potatoes dug from the ground, black as the hands of the mechanic I’d known in New York when I was selling insurance. He’d held up his hands to me one afternoon as I came in to reclaim my car. “See these hands?” he said. I looked. The skin was uniformly black, as if it had been dyed or tattooed, the nails were gone, black callus gave way to gray. “You think you got it bad,” he said. “At least you don’t have to get your hands dirty.” It was a revelation: ineradicable dirt, stigmatic dirt, dirt as an unbridgeable social barrier. I’d tried to picture him at the Waldorf or Gracie Mansion, making polite conversation and passing the croissants with hands that looked as if they’d been exhuming corpses. Now, and for the next nine months, we’d know how he felt.

A gust of wind rattled the windows. I shivered. We needed heat, we needed hot water, we needed soap. Phil pried some rusted two-penny nails from a sagging outbuilding and nailed the door shut, while Gesh kindled the fire with his lighter and then hunted up a Coleman lantern. I didn’t know what to do. Voodoo drums were pounding in my ears, a fist beat at my stomach, the witchery of the calendar as unsettling as an effigy transfixed with pins. I couldn’t help it: I was shaken.

“Come on, man,” Gesh said, wadding up newspapers and feeding them into the stove, “snap out of it. You know as well as I do the whole thing is just that shithead Vogelsang’s idea of a joke—big laugh, you know?”

It was true that Vogelsang had been up to the property at least twice already, and true, too, that his sense of humor was skewed, to say the least. I remembered the newspaper file he’d once produced for me. A manila folder crammed with the responses to ads he’d placed in
The Berkeley Barb
and
The Bay Guardian.
One of the ads read “Man or Beast? Love Animals
… But Love Them the
Right
Way,” and gave a P.O. box number. He received twelve responses, one of which came from a male zookeeper who expressed a fondness for big cats and whips, and another of which invited him to spend the weekend on a sheep ranch in Marshall. Still another gave the vital statistics on a wire-haired pointer named Rex, suggested a liaison, and was cosigned with a woman’s name and the print of the dog’s right forepaw. Vogelsang never told me if he accepted.

And then of course there were the stuffed animals and the mannequins and all the rest. Yes, I thought, he’s capable of it—and I even pictured him digging the old calendar out of the storage shed, his face lighting with perverse inspiration as he circled the date and nailed the thing to the wall. But in the same instant I felt the tug of superstition, and I saw an unknown hand, three decades back, painstakingly marking the date of some future event in a pathetic expression of longing—or worse, apprehension.

While I was agonizing over a pencil smudge, Phil was scorching his eyebrows in an attempt to ignite and adjust the pilot on the water heater. He finally succeeded, with a
whoosh
that agitated the windows and singed his pompadour as neatly as if he’d paid twenty-five bucks for a flame cut. Abashed, I took charge of dinner. While we waited for the piéeGce de réeAsistance—hot water—I opened three cans of beer, an institutional-sized bucket of Malloy’s Red Hot Texas Chili, and a loaf of white bread. Exhausted, we sprawled in front of the stove, baking like pots in a kiln, the mud crusting and peeling from us in stringy lumps while we sipped warm beer and mopped up cold chili.

Then we turned to the bathroom. There was a sink, a bathtub, a toilet (which, like the facilities on railway coaches, simply opened on the ground below; but whereas the railroad apparatus worked on the principle of fecal dissemination, ours relied on gravity and the slope of the ravine). The tub looked as if it had last been used to disinfect lepers, the porcelain pus-yellow and ringed with the strata of ancient immersions. It was a color that reminded me of the urinals at the old Penn Station, filth beyond redemption. I brought the Coleman lantern closer, and we examined the calcium-flecked fixtures, the husks of desiccated insects,
the network of cracks that veined the inner surface of the tub like the map of a river delta. We stood there, as hushed as if we were gazing on the ruins of Lepcis Magna, until Gesh broke the silence. “Me first,” he said.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I protested. “Let’s at least draw lots or something.”

“I did most of the pushing out there,” Gesh said, but without much conviction. He looked like one of those New Guinea shamans who make masks of dried mud, his head big as a pumpkin, each strand of hair braided with dirt.

“Doesn’t matter.” Phil’s tone was crisp, businesslike. He produced a box of wooden matches, shook out two with sober-faced gravity, halved one and turned his back. Then he swung round, the three matchsticks protruding from the plane of his clenched fist like pins in a pincushion, and presented his hand first to Gesh, then to me.

Phil got the long one. “Flip you for seconds,” Gesh said, the coin already gleaming feebly in the dull glow of the lantern. “Tails,” I said, and lost.

Phil ran the water till it went cold. Then he shrugged out of his clothes, flung them in a silty heap beneath the sink—where they would undergo a gradual petrifaction as the weeks dragged by—and eased into the tub, moaning like a man in the throes of the consummate orgasm.

We watched from the doorway. “Five minutes,” I shouted, checking my Benrus.

By the time my turn came round, the water was tepid, and the color and texture of the Mississippi in flood. No matter. This was real dirt I was covered with—stinking, fermenting, wild-woods dirt—and there would be no peace, no sweet surcease from care, until I got it off me. Besides, I reflected as I lowered myself into the soup, as last man to bathe I could linger as long as I liked.

I didn’t. The water went cold almost immediately and the tap water was colder still. I lathered up, rinsed off, patted myself with a wet towel and made for the back bedroom, the ominous calendar and my damp sleeping bag. I was beat, every joint rubbed raw. Rain lashed at the roof, tiny feet scratched in the corners. I slept like a zombie.