Budding Prospects (16 page)

If Phil could clown about it, I couldn’t. I was tense, shaken, wired to the breaking point. Things were conspiring against us, all our sweat and toil come to naught: we weren’t going to wind up rich, we were going to wind up in jail.

“We’ll stick to the back roads,” Gesh said. Back roads? What was he talking about—there were nothing
but
back roads. “And instead of buying supplies in Willits, we’ll go all the way down to Santa Rosa, where nobody’ll notice.”

I didn’t want to end up in jail. But even worse than the thought of jail was the thought of the bust itself. A dozen troopers, in riot helmets and flak jackets, bursting through the door at first light, roughing us up, rifling our possessions, hauling us off in
sorrow and subjection—it had become the standard nightmare. Still worse was its corollary, its sad and inevitable conclusion: detection would mean the end of the project, the failure of the farm.

Something had happened to me over the course of the past few weeks, something that transformed me with each crank of the come-along and thrust of the shovel: I’d become a believer. Perhaps it was the evangelical fervor with which Phil, Gesh and even Dowst regarded the project, perhaps it was the callus I’d developed on my hands and feet or the strips of muscle that corrugated my back and swelled the veins of my arms—but whatever it was, I’d been bitten more deeply than I realized. If I’d entered into the thing as a lark, an adventure, attracted as much by the action as the money, I was now fully, absolutely and zealously committed to making it work.

How else could I have gone on, day after day, pitching dirt and hammering fenceposts like a flunky? How else if I wasn’t certain in the very root of my being, in the last looping curve of my innermost gut, that we would succeed?
No gains without pains
, Poor Richard said.
Plough deep … and you shall have corn to sell and to keep.
Yes, indeed. We would subdue the land, make it produce, squeeze the dollars from it through sacrifice, sheer force of will and Yankee gumption. It was the dream of the pioneers themselves.

But I was no pioneer. I was edgy, nervous, a chronic quitter. If I understand now how deeply involved I was in the summer camp—it
had
to succeed, not so much for the money itself or what it could buy, but as the tangible and final result of our labor, the fruit of our enterprise, the proof of the dream—I did not understand it then. Not that night. Not there in the kitchen, my face hot with the glow of the lantern and the shock of Jerpbak. Maybe I was being irrational, loosing my fears like hobgoblins and bogies—but then the calendar and Jerpbak’s reemergence were irrational, too. I was spooked. I was angry.

“Okay,” Phil said, “we’re all a little paranoid. But just because of one newspaper article and a couple of cops that just happen to sit behind us in a diner, for Christ’s sake …” He waved his hand as if he were swatting gnats.

Gesh ran his fingers through his hair, then settled himself on
the edge of the table and folded his arms. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, “I think you’re blowing things way out of proportion, man. Sure it’s bad news that this fucking jerk is launching a one-man crusade to bust dope farmers, but you got to remember there’s a lot of dope farmers out there. To think he’s out to get you is insane, it’s preposterous.”

“Dr. Freud, I presume?” Phil said. He tried to shake my hand but I pulled away.

“I mean, do you really think he bugged the ashtray in your Toyota or something—just because you made an illegal U-turn?”

I had to get out. The pressure was building in me like beer on a full bladder. I snatched my jacket from the chair and slammed out the door.

The night was torn with ragged clouds. Stars whitened the gaps, crickets pulsed like a heartbeat. Somewhere a tree groaned. There was a breeze—damp, fragrant—a southerly breeze that smelled as if it had rattled coconut palms and lifted the scent from hibiscus and frangipani. It wafted up now, a touch of warmth, out of the darkness that engulfed our lower growing areas. I gazed at the sky, clear in the interstices all the way back to the molars of the galaxy, and did not think the least thought about man’s fate, the unfathomable universe or group sex on Pentagord. I thought of things worldly and quotidian. Jerpbak. The greenhouse. Mysteriously blighted seedlings.

I breathed deeply—spring breeze, late April already—urinated in the model hole and fumbled my way to the greenhouse. The feather-light door swung back on the hinges I’d installed, and I stepped in and surrendered to the rank wild odor of working soil, of fertility and the dark germ of life. Dowst’s flashlight hung from a bent nail just inside the door. I found it and let the tube of light play over the ranks of Styrofoam cups, the stunted and late-emerging plants we’d yet to put in the ground and the flashing strips of aluminum foil Dowst had tacked up as reflectors. He’d arranged the planters on racks in ascending tiers—like grandstands—with a narrow footpath in between. Still agitated, I threaded my way up the path, thinking to find solace in the still, burgeoning atmosphere. It was a mistake. With
the healthy plants already in the ground, the place looked barren. I surveyed it slowly, dismally, the husks of dead plantlings brushing at my pants, new growth spotting the remaining cups like a sprinkle in the desert.

Dowst had left for Marin three days earlier, in quest of the seeds we so desperately needed to make up our deficit (with just over a thousand seedlings planted, we needed at least nine hundred more to approach our original estimate). There were, he insisted, entrepreneurs who let their fall crops go to seed to provide for the germinatory needs of people like us—for a price, of course. A price that would come out of our net profit. And though it was a pity that the germination rate of his own seeds hadn’t been higher—that’s nature’s choice, he said, clucking his tongue—he was confident he could obtain more than enough new seeds to suit our purposes. As I stood there counting cups in the tenebrous cave of the greenhouse, I hoped he was right.

Nearly three-quarters of the cups were empty. In some there was no evidence whatever that anything had been planted; in others, wilted brown stalks gave testimony to some inscrutable depredation. Phil maintained that the locusts were responsible—couldn’t we hear them screeching in the trees? Gesh thought it might be aphids. Or beetles or something. Dowst, standing firm on the quality of his seeds, theorized that a fungus may have been attacking the roots of the young plants. I was puzzled, distressed. I’d watched the infinitesimal green filaments emerge from the earth, crooked as sweetly as dollar signs, and then come back the following morning to see that they’d been grazed to the root as I slept. Night after night I stalked the greenhouse, sitting in darkness, breath suspended, ears perked, waiting for the telltale crunch of mandibles or the scurry of soleless feet, and always I’d been skunked. There was nothing there—neither beetles nor aphids. Nor snails, leafhoppers, fruit flies or flying sheep for that matter. Just a silence, a silence so absolute I imagined I could hear the seeds rupturing their shells. Now, as I probed the cluttered corners with the flashlight, a sinking defeated feeling took hold of me—as if I’d been crushed under and sucked dry like a bad seed—and suddenly I understood that I was looking at the greenhouse for the last time.

It was an old feeling, compounded of fury and despair, a
choking impotent rage that could only be salved by turning away, by running. I’d felt it when I reread the same page of Carlyle for the fiftieth time, stuffed my books in a trashcan and took the bus for San Francisco while Ronnie waited tables and old Dr. Pengrave sat checking his watch and fussing over the exam questions he’d never get to ask me. I’d felt it in Boston, looking out from the projectionist’s booth at the nodding heads and listening to the furtive clatter of white port bottles on the stained cement floor. I’d felt it when I was out of work and out of luck and Ronnie came home and told me she’d been accepted in the MBA program at Wharton and I looked up from my magazine and told her I wasn’t moving. Yes: then especially. I remembered the look on her face, the way she held out the acceptance letter as if it were the deed to an oil well or a certificate of beatification. I put you through four years of grad school, she said. Four years. Now it’s my turn.

Death, defeat, futility, that’s what the greenhouse said to me. I turned my back on it. Like a magic lantern—magnetic, irresistible—the flashlight pulled me across the junk-strewn morass of the lot and on up to the door of the Toyota. I dropped the flashlight in the high grass, dug for my keys and fired up the car with a roar. A moment later I was yawing through the undergrowth and heaving down the gutted road to the highway. The headlights grabbed at the darkness like pincers, trees rocked over me, a deer sprang up and vanished like an illusion. I thought of my apartment. Of movie theaters and Thai food and color TV. Of my stereo, my drip coffee maker, of daily newspapers, books, magazines, of the society of men—and women. Branches swiped at the windshield, a rock exploded against the under-surface of the car, ruts and gullies grabbed the wheel from me and flung it back again. Carefully, carefully, I told myself. I was on my way home.

By the time I reached the blacktop, I was thinking of baseball. I don’t know how or why—free association, I suppose. It began with a vision of the players emerging from the dugout against a green that ached, and the feel of the cold salt air of Candlestick Park. I could smell the sour scent of beer in wax cups, flat before it’s been tapped, and then I panned across the crowd: men in T-shirts, women in print dresses, the legions of kids in the
bleachers waving their outsized gloves. I thought of balls wrapped in black electrician’s tape and bats that shudder in your hands, and then finally of Little League and my own eleven-year-old self. The memory was like a splinter under the nail.

Small for my age and late to develop, I’d devoted my life to baseball with the passion of an apostle: baseball was the be-all and end-all, the highest expression and fundamental
raison
for life in the cosmos. Regrettably, my skills were incommensurate with my enthusiasm, and I’d been shunted to right field the previous season—right field, the least dynamic, least significant position on the team, the venue of hacks and losers—and through the winter I burned to prove myself capable of playing closer to the action. That summer I tried out for third base. The hot corner. Where Brooks Robinson and the Boyer brothers routinely dove for scorching liners, leapt to rob batters of extra base hits, scooped up bunts as if they were gathering flowers, and in general demonstrated more skill, guts and panache than anyone on the field. All winter I’d shoveled snow and scrubbed dishes, hoarding nickels, dimes, quarters, the big flat shining half dollars I got for clearing the neighbors’ sidewalks, saving for the ne plus ultra—a new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s mitt endorsed by and stamped with the signature of Brooks Robinson himself. Eventually, a twenty-five-pound sack of change in hand, I trundled into the sporting-goods store and bought the glove. I worked it and oiled it, and when the snow was gone I was out till dark every day, fielding grounders. I practiced continually, obsessively, practiced till I could handle anything—bad hops, skimmers, liners, dribblers and worm-burners. I was ready.

We tried out on a sweet sunny day in June. The field was new, freshly bulldozed and totally barren. There were stones and pebbles everywhere. Five of us competed for third base while the coach, a laconic veteran of the Korean War whose son was the star pitcher, hammered grounders at us. The first kid handled every ball with fluid ease; the next two flubbed them miserably. Then it was my turn. Thirty-thousand ground balls had been hit to me over the course of the past three months; I was practiced and assured, ready for anything. The first ball came slamming at me over the rocky hardpan of the infield, I bent for it and it took a bad bounce, careening over my shoulder and into the
outfield. All right, I thought, the field is like a gravel pit, don’t let it get to you. The same thing happened with the two succeeding chances. Humiliated, raging, I charged the next ball as soon as it came off the bat, pounced on it as if I were killing something for the pot, and heaved it six feet over the first baseman’s head. The coach looked disgusted. He spat in the dirt. Two more, he said. And then, before I’d even set up, the next ball came rocketing at me. I moved back, adjusting as it skipped over the stones in its path, and at the last instant I lifted my glove for the inevitable hop. No hop. The ball went right through my legs and on out to the left-field fence, where a bored-looking kid with an underslung jaw shagged it back.

Object, movement, the elusive patterns of fate: I had never in my life been so stung with despair and self-hatred. Even before the coach could bring the bat to his shoulder for my final chance, I came out of my crouch and flung my new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s glove into the parking lot. Then I ran. Ran through a gale of shouts and laughter, mounted my bike and pedaled up the street as if the Furies were shrieking in my ears. My breath came in sobs. At home, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword puzzle. It wasn’t fair, I told her, choking on the bitterness of it. I tried, I did. She pushed back her chair, got up from the table and looked down at me from her five feet and eight inches, sleeves rolled up, earrings dangling. Quitter, she said.

The memory arrested me. A moment before I’d been doing seventy, outracing the headlights, intent on San Francisco, and now I found myself slowing. Degree by degree, almost unconsciously, my foot eased up on the gas pedal. Signs, trees, fenceposts drifted up and trickled by, forty, thirty, twenty-five: I nearly pulled over. I was thinking of Phil and Gesh back in the cabin, sitting down to their fatty, starchy, tasteless meal, cracking jokes and dreaming the dream. Then the car rounded a bend and two dim spots of neon emerged from the darkness, soft and alluring, beacons in the night. I swung the wheel, and for the second time in my life pulled into the pitted parking lot of Shirelle’s Bum Steer.