Budding Prospects (2 page)

I puttered round the apartment, half-listening, changing the record, lowering the volume on the TV, digging out an ashtray, four bottles of beer and a plastic envelope of pot. Vogelsang followed me, step for step, lecturing. Dowst and the girl sat on the couch. As soon as the pot hit the coffee table, Dowst snatched it up, opened the Baggie and sniffed it—breathed it rather, like a snorkeler coming up for air—made a disdainful face and tossed the bag back down as if it contained some unspeakable refuse on the order of dog turds or decomposing sparrow eggs. I caught this out of the corner of my eye as I was slipping Stravinsky back into his jacket.

“Boyd’s just finished up his Master’s degree at Yale,” Vogelsang said, easing down on the arm of the couch and taking a swig of beer for dramatic emphasis, “in botanical science.”

I pulled up a chair. “Congratulations,” I murmured, glancing at Dowst, and abruptly changed the subject—who wanted to
hear about some overgrown preppie and his academic laurels? I’d been that route myself. I said something about the rain, then made a bad joke about the quality of the entertainment at Vogelsang’s party.

“You don’t understand,” Vogelsang persisted.
“Botanical science:
he can grow anything, anywhere.”

I nodded. The girl was looking at me as if I were a sandwich in the window of a delicatessen, and Dowst was squinting at a copy of
Scientific American
he’d dug out of the pile of newspapers on the floor. Muffled shrieks came from the TV. I glanced up to see the heroine trapped in a hallway made of flimsy plasterboard while the hairy arms of zombies—I marveled at their insatiability—punched through the walls to grab at her.

Vogelsang set the beer down, fished the mouth spray from his pocket and treated himself to a single squeeze, the puff of soapy atomized liquid like a cloud of frozen breath on a cold morning. “I closed a deal on three hundred and ninety acres in Mendocino County today,” he said. “Remote as the moon, with a cabin on it.”

Dowst looked up from his reading. “And with year-round water.” I noticed that he hadn’t bothered to remove the rain slicker. It billowed round him like an aniline tent, a glistening yellow barber’s gown tucked in at the neck. He pawed ineffectually at a strand of wet hair that dangled alongside his nose, then went back to the magazine.

“That’s right,” Vogelsang added, “a creek and two separate springs.”

It was twelve-thirty. I’d heard
The Rite of Spring
, it was raining, I was tired. I wondered what Vogelsang was driving at. “Sounds nice,” I said.

“We’re going to start a summer camp.” He was smirking, as if this were the punch line of a subtly developed joke. Dowst chuckled appreciatively. The girl sat hunched over her untouched bottle of Moosehead lager and stared through the wall. I got up and switched on the radio.

There was the sudden hollow thumping of a distant bass drum, some machine-shop noises, and then a strange detached female voice pushing ice through the speakers:

“Listen, Felix,” Vogelsang was saying, “how would you like to make half a million dollars, tax-free?”

I sat down again. All three of them were watching me now. “You’re joking,” I said.

“Dead serious.” Vogelsang was giving me his Charlie Manson stare. He used it when he wanted you to know he was dead serious.

“What,” I laughed, bending for my beer, “running a summer camp?”

“Cannabis sativa,”
Dowst said, as softly as if he were revealing one of the secret names of God.

“We’re going to grow two thousand plants.” Vogelsang was studying the vial of breath neutralizer as if it were inscribed with the hieroglyphs of economic calculation, with cost-ratio tables and sliding scales for depreciation and uninsured loss. He looked up. “Figure half a pound per plant. One thousand pounds at sixteen hundred dollars a pound.” He raised the vial to his mouth, dropped his jaw in anticipation, then thought better of it. I said nothing. The plastic tube tapped at his pursed lips, mesmeric, lifting and falling to the pulse of the music. “I put up the capital and provide the land, Boyd comes in every few days to oversee the operation and you provide the labor. We split three ways.”

Suddenly I was wide awake, brain cells flashing like free-game lights in a pinball machine. Vogelsang didn’t make mistakes—I knew that. I knew, too, that he had a genius for making money, a genius of which I’d been beneficiary on two serendipitous occasions in the past. (The first time we went partners on a battered Victorian in the Haight, put out three thousand dollars on a twenty-thousand-dollar purchase price, refurbished the place for fifteen and sold it for a hundred. The second time he merely phoned, gave me the name of a broker, and told me to buy as much zirconium as I could. I had eight thousand dollars in the bank and I was out of work. I made more in a week than I’d made all year.) No: if Vogelsang was behind it, it would go. As certainly as Segovia had been born to finger a fretboard or Willie
Mays to swing a bat, Vogelsang had been born to sow pennies and reap dollars. Thirty-three, and already independent of any visible means of support—he hadn’t held a job since I’d known him—he nosed out investments, traded in commodities both licit and illicit, bought and sold buildings and property and God knew what else—and all with the unshakable confidence and killing instinct of an apprentice Gould or Carnegie.

And his timing was exquisite, I had to admit that. He’d come to me at just the right moment, a year and a half after my divorce, a time when I was depressed and restless, a time when I was beginning to feel like a prisoner in solitary. Half a million dollars. It was as if the head of NASA had just asked me if I’d like to be the first man to walk on Mars. There were risks involved, sure, but that was what made the project so enticing—the frisson, the audacity, the monumental pissing in the face of society. Vogelsang wasn’t going to grow a hundred plants or a hundred and fifty, he wasn’t going to be content with fifteen or twenty thousand—no, he was going to grow marijuana like Reynolds grew tobacco. My blood was racing. When I looked up into the three faces intent on my own, I was already halfway there.

“I don’t know a thing about growing marijuana,” I said finally. Vogelsang was ready for this. “You don’t have to,” he said, lifting himself from the chair arm, “—that’s Boyd’s department.”

“But two thousand plants … can one person handle that sort of thing?”

“No way,” Dowst said, rustling his rain slicker.

“We figure you’ll need two full-time people to help out. Who they are and how you pay them is up to you. You could hire them on a straight salary, or split your five hundred into shares. But whatever, they’ve got to be willing to give up the next nine months of their lives, and above all they’ve got to be”—here he paused to come up with the right word—“discreet.”

Rain hit the roof like pennies from heaven, the icy voice on the radio was chanting
Money, give me money,/Money, give me money.
^©
We were all standing, for some reason. Dowst and Vogelsang were grinning, the girl’s face had softened with what I took to be a sort of truculent amicability.

“How about your friend up in Tahoe,” Vogelsang said, as if he’d had a sudden inspiration (I realized at that instant he’d been
playing me all along, like a street-corner salesman, a carnival barker making his pitch). “What’s his name …” (he knew it as well as I) “Cherniske?”

“Phil,” I said, half to myself. “Yeah, Phil,” as if I’d stumbled across the solution to a baffling puzzle.

Vogelsang took hold of my hand and pumped it in a congratulatory way, Dowst showing all his long gleaming teeth now, the girl fighting to keep the corners of her mouth from curling into a smile. I felt as if I’d just come back from sailing around the world or whipping the defending Wimbledon champ. I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no, but already Vogelsang was lifting his half-empty Moosehead bottle and calling for a toast.

He had an arm round my shoulder, zombies disintegrated on the TV screen as heroes lobbed grenades at them, the cold voice chanted
money
in my ear, the smell of musk, of conception, of semen and the dark essence of the earth fired my nostrils, and then he flung up his hand, bottle clenched tight, like an evangelist called to witness: “To the summer camp!”

There was nothing in my early upbringing to indicate a life of crime. I wasn’t beaten, orphaned or abandoned, I didn’t hang out on street corners with a cigarette in my mouth and a stiletto in my pocket, I wasn’t mentally disfigured from years in a reformatory or morally and physically sapped as a result of shooting smack on pigeon-shit-encrusted stoops in the ghetto. No: I was a child of the middle class, nurtured on Tiger’s Milk and TV dinners and Aureomycin until I towered over my parents like some big-footed freak of another species, like a cuckoo raised by sparrows. I knew algebra, appreciated Verdi, ate veal marsala, sushi and escargots, and selected a good bottle of wine. My record, if not spotless, was tainted only by the most venial infractions. There had been the usual traffic violations, an unfortunate incident on the steps of the Justice Department during one of the Washington marches, and a fine for carrying an open container on the streets of Lake George. But that was about it. Certainly, like any other solid citizen with inalienable rights, I broke laws regularly—purchasing and consuming controlled substances, driving at a steady sixty-five on freeways, fornicating in water beds and hot tubs, micturating in public, knowingly and willingly being in the presence of persons who, etc., etc. On the other hand, I didn’t litter, extort, burgle, batter, assault, rape or murder. At thirty-one, endowed with the cautiousness and conservatism of maturity, I could arguably consider myself, if not a pillar, then at least a flying buttress of bourgeois society.

Still, two hours after Vogelsang had left, and despite a weariness that verged on narcolepsy and a steady blinding Niagara of a rainstorm, I was on my way to Lake Tahoe to take my first irretrievable steps into the lower depths.

At four a.m. I pulled into a truckstop and sat hunched over the counter on a cracked vinyl stool, spooned up grease and eggs, listened to moronic country-inflected yodeling from the jukebox, and drank eight cups of coffee that tasted of death and metal. The rain had stopped, and I watched myself in the dark, water-flecked window for a moment, my face lit by neon and the flashing lights of semis, and saw that my eyes glared and cheeks bristled with the look of criminality. Or tiredness. Then I left some money on the counter, stumbled out to my rust-spotted Toyota, and drove on up the hill to where dawn was flaring over South Tahoe.

I missed the turnoff for Cherniske’s place, everything uniform at this altitude, snow on the ground like a fungus, trees as alike as a forest of Dixon pencils. Without thinking, I swerved to cut a U-turn and was nearly annihilated by a California highway patrolman doing about ninety on urgent business. The thing that saved my life—and the patrolman’s—was the supersiren with which the CHP car was equipped, the sort of deadly, heart-seizing klaxon fire trucks use when approaching intersections. I was halfway through my illegal U-turn, horizontal to the flow of traffic and already obstructing an entire lane, oblivious to sirens, lights, the possibility of runaway logging trucks, when the klaxon slapped me like an angry hand. My foot went to the floor, tires squealed, brake drums clapped like cymbals, and the Toyota lurched to a halt as the CHP cruiser careened past the front bumper, inches to spare. As he passed, the patrolman gave me a quick sharp look of murderous intensity—a look that said, I would shoot you here, now, no questions asked, as automatically as I would shoot a rattlesnake or a junkyard rat, but for this appalling emergency that requires my dedication, bravery and expertise—and then he was gone, a pair of taillights skidding round a corner in the distance.

Mortified, I pulled the car round just in time to avoid the
shrieking ambulance for which the cruiser had been running interference, humbly shifted gears, signaled, and swung onto the wet glistening blacktop road that snaked through the trees to Cherniske’s place. Almost instantly there was a thump, the wheel was jerked from my hand, and the car veered wildly for the shoulder and a clutch of nasty russet-barked pines. I’d been driving since I was sixteen and, groggy though I was, rose to the occasion, snatching the wheel back and regaining control without missing a beat. Calmly, almost clinically, I noted the cause of my minor emergency: there was a groove in the road. A deep insistent gash that seamed the right-hand lane like a furrow, as if some absentminded sodbuster had neglected to lift the plow blade while rumbling home on his tractor. I would have thought nothing more of it but for the fact that the groove seemed to be going in the same direction I was, turn for turn. I followed it down Alpine Way to the end, left on Lederhosen Lane, left again on Chalet Drive, and then, amazingly, into Phil’s driveway and right on up to the bumper of his sagging ’62 Cadillac.

Phil’s house—a two-story chalet/cabin/condo/duplex—was silent, the windows dark. It was seven a.m., and the early light had been absorbed in a low ceiling of ropy cloud the color of charcoal. I swung out of the car and examined Phil’s Cadillac: it was pitched forward like a crippled stegosaur, tail fins in the air, and the right front fender and a portion of the hood had been crumpled like tinfoil. Looking closer, I saw that not only was the tire gone on that side, but the brake drum and wheel as well. The car was resting on a sheared splinter of axle, from the apex of which the groove raveled out up the driveway, down the blacktop road, and out to the highway. The engine was still warm.

No one responded to my knock. This was no surprise: I hadn’t really expected a formal reception. At this hour, Phil and his assorted roommates would be entering the first leaden phase of deep sleep, having closed the bars in California and roamed the casinos of Stateline, Nevada, until dawn. The door was unlatched. I stepped in, sleeping bag under my arm, thinking to curl up on the couch, wake when they did, and put my proposition to Phil over breakfast. It was colder inside than out, and
the place had a familiar subterranean smell to it—a smell of underwear and socks worn too long, of stale beer, primitive cooking and a species of mold that thrives under adverse conditions. The shades were drawn, but there was light enough to distinguish generic shapes: TV, armchair, couch, bicycle, lamp, log. I groped my way to the couch, unfurled the sleeping bag and sat down.