Budding Prospects (43 page)

I stood there in the center of the room for a long moment, watching the shadows swell and darken like living organisms, listening to the inexhaustible rain as it spanked the ground beneath the eaves. What was I waiting for? What was I doing? I shook my head like a drunk under the shower and then walked down the hallway to my room to see if I’d left anything. The door pushed open to the scrape of frantic feet and there was a blur of movement as the rat flew along the baseboard and vanished in the shadows; he’d been digging into the stained and stinking underbelly of my mattress as he might have dug into a corpse. Naked tail, a brush of whisker and the quick flashing eye: he’d been reinstated, restored to his rightful dominion. The mattress, the fetid soup cans and mouldering chicken bones, the 3-in-1 oil and the complete adventures of Bors Borka: these were his legacy.

Looping filaments of dirt festooned the walls, the floor sagged in the center as under the force of some invisible weight, a lustrous tan spider slid up and down the guys of its trembling web like a finger on the neck of a banjo. I hadn’t forgotten
anything. The wastebasket was full, scraps of glossy magazines (idealized photos of food and women, in that order) slashed at the walls, newspapers, torn flannel shirts and worn jeans lay heaped on the floor. I’d left them consciously, purposely, as I might have left them in a burning building or a foundering ship: why bother, after all? The whole run-down, gutted, roof-rent slum was nothing more than an oversized refuse bin, was the essence of trash itself.

I turned to go—as I’d turned nearly nine months earlier, fresh from the city and stunned by the desolation of the place—and found myself confronting the calendar on the back panel of the door. I’d seen it a thousand times, ignored it, mocked it, forgotten it, but there it was. Still. The woman in the cloche hat with her face averted, the rubric of the year, the page splayed out and defaced by an unknown hand in forgotten times. A bad joke, nothing more.

We’d harvested prematurely, nearly two weeks ahead of the designated date. Today was the thirty-first—Halloween—and we were gone. Or going. Whatever the orphic calendar portended for the thirty-second anniversary of my birth—joy or calamity or provocation—no longer mattered. I reached out, slipped the calendar from the rusty nail that secured it, folded it once and tucked it into my back pocket.

The rain seemed heavier as I maneuvered the Toyota down the drive, past the block of pillow basalt and the downed tree limbs, and out of the clutch of the angry grasping branches. Water fanned out over the windshield faster than the spastic wipers could drive it back, the headlights made phantoms of the steaming tree trunks, my breath clouded the windows. I was picking my way carefully, maintaining momentum to keep from bogging down, my thoughts on Phil and Gesh and our rendezvous later that night, when all at once I found myself hallucinating.

There, against the soft stagy backdrop of the trees, was an apparition, the ghost of harvest past, the clown prince of the scythe, in motley and whiteface. Huge, swelling to gargantuan proportions under the approaching headlights, the figure slogged to the far berm and stood frozen beside the road. As I eased by, the flaring point of highest illumination giving way in a flash to
invisibility, I understood that this was no hallucination. No, this was flesh, flesh with a vengeance: beneath the frippery I recognized the big bones and broad vacant gaze of Marlon Sapers. Marlon Sapers, mannish boy, got up as superabundant clown, replete with bulbous nose and pancake jowls, in a drenched ruffled shirtfront and baggy suit with dancing polka dots and writhing stripes, Marlon Sapers, come to mock me. I stopped. Rolled down the window to the teeth of the blow and peered back into the rubicund glow of the taillights. I could barely make him out. “Marlon?” I called. Water rushed past the wheels with the thousand moans of the drowning, rain drilled the roof. There was no answer. But then, reedy, childlike, as tinny as a bad recording, his voice came to me over the crash of the storm—he seemed to be complaining, or no, he was offering something. “Suck your feet?” he asked.

For a moment I lost him. The car coughed and spat, mist seeped out of the earth. Then he took a step forward and his face emerged from the night, pink, garish, huge, floating in the wash of darkness like an orb in the infinite. His expression startled me. He seemed to be grinning—Cheshire Cat, Robin Good-fellow—grinning as if in contemplation of some killing, suprahuman jest.

The pillowcase appeared from nowhere, legerdemain. It was bulging, wet as skin, its neck gaping wide between his big buttery fists. “Trick or treat?” he said.

I got into San Francisco about half past ten to find the mud-spattered U-Haul parked directly in front of my apartment—and poorly parked at that. One wheel was up on the curb, the cab obscured a sign that threatened TOW AWAY come seven the next morning, and Gesh had managed to straddle two and a half prime, precious, hotly sought-after and fiercely contested parking spaces. To cap it off, he’d settled beneath a high-intensity streetlamp that lit the rear of the truck like a stage. Our plan had been to meet at Vogelsang’s—we would surprise him with the truckload of pot and coerce him into allowing us to string it up to dry in his cavernous rooms and endless hallways—but the plan had fallen flat. Typically. As I discovered on arriving at the Bolinas manse, Vogelsang had eluded us once again. The gates were locked, the house was dark, the lewd mannequins stood guard. I found a note from Phil and Gesh pinned to the main gate. It read, simply,
Fair Oaks.

My co-conspirators were sunk into the furniture in the front room as I plodded up the stairs with my suitcase and Phil’s guitar. They were drinking beer, testing the limits of the stereo system with an album called
White Noise Plays White Noise
, and watching a sitcom about a quadraplegic detective who ferrets out evildoers through astral projection. I was wet, weary, hypnotized to the point of catatonia by the incessant frantic swipe of the Toyota’s windshield wipers. The suitcase plummeted from my grip, Phil’s guitar dropped into the rocking chair. I cut the
volume on the stereo and offered an observation. “You made it,” I said.

Still bandaged, still depilated, his bad eye blazing with the awakening joy of the exile returned, Phil swung round to acknowledge the soundness of my observation. Gesh set his beer down. “Vogelsang wasn’t there, the son of a bitch,” he said.

Outside, in the close, shadowy depths of the U-Haul van, a hundred bags of sodden marijuana stood ready to mildew, rot, deliquesce into soup. “So I noticed,” I said.

Another thing I noticed was the shopping bag at Phil’s feet. The paper was crisp and unblemished and it bore the logo of the corner market. Inside, atop a six-pack of generic beer, were five spanking-white cellophane-wrapped coils of clothesline. Phil was watching me closely. In the background, White Noise’s keyboard virtuoso was attempting an auditory re-creation of the siege of Britain. Gesh was watching me too. The bombs fell, the machine guns rattled. “What now?” Phil said.

We brought the pot in, a bag at a time, just after three. The streets were quiet, the glare of the streetlamp softened by a milky drizzle. Up the stairs and down, the landlord wondering at the thump of our footsteps, the sacks of contraband like body bags, like pelf, like the insidious pods in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
We worked quickly, silently, our shoulders slumped with guilt, our eyes raking the streets for the first stab of the patrol car’s headlights. Phil stood in the back of the truck and tossed the bags forward, while Gesh and I hustled them up the stairs like ants scrambling under the burden of their misshapen egg cases. At one point a car stopped just down the street to discharge a passenger, engine rumbling, headlights slicing into the rear of the truck. We froze. A pair of voices echoed through the haze and bounded off the wet pavement, and a moment later a gangling teenager in a Gumby costume ambled up the street and into our midst. We gave him stares like swords. He looked down at his feet.

Upstairs, I regarded the spill of slick plastic bags as I might have regarded the debris of a natural disaster or the baggage of desert nomads. The living room was inundated, the kitchen piled high, the spare room glimmering with the dull sheen of plastic. Already Gesh had begun to string the rope across the living
room, securing the ends with a quick booming convergence of hammer and nail. Phil twisted open the wet bags, shook the plants over the carpet in a tumult of rasping leaves, shuddering buds and precipitant moisture, inverted them with a flick of his wrist and hooked them over the clothesline like so many wet overcoats. I cracked a window, wondering what I’d let myself in for now. Then I set the thermostat at 95 degrees and started up a pair of ratchetting fans I dug out of a box in the basement. We worked furiously, noisily. Clumsy with exhaustion, we stumbled into one another: the hammer thumped, the bags rippled, our footsteps played a frantic tarantella across the ceiling of the apartment below. As Gesh’s hammer rapped at the wall for perhaps the fiftieth time, my landlord, a middle-aged bachelor with a viscid Armenian accent, rapped at the outside door. This rapping, unidentified at first, put us in mind of agents of the law and gave us a final nasty shock, a coda to the demonic symphony of such shocks we’d endured over the course of the past nine months. But then the landlord’s voice rose faintly from the well of the stairs—“Fee-lix!”—and I knew we’d been delivered once again.

I met him at the base of the stairs, regarding him warily from my end of the security chain. He was wearing a skullcap and a pair of dirty striped pajamas that looked as if they’d been lifted from an internment camp, he was barefoot and his sleepy eyes were riddled with incomprehension. “What is happening here?” he said, his mouth working beneath the blue bristle of his beard. “This, this …” and he held his hands like claws to the side of his head, “this thrumping and bang-ing.”

I told him my mother had died and that my brothers and I were constructing the coffin ourselves, in deference to the traditions of the old country. Wired, beat, my apartment devastated and body sapped, I didn’t have much trouble looking appropriately distraught. “Old country?” he said. “What is that?”

“Boston,” I told him, sober as a motherless child.

He looked at me for a long moment, the whites of his eyes crosshatched with broken blood vessels, lids crusted and inflamed. Three-chord rock and roll and the
boom-boom-boom
of the hammer filtered down from above. Breath steamed from his big flared nostrils; he shuffled his bare feet on the wet pavement.
He looked puzzled, disoriented, looked as if he were about to say something but couldn’t quite get it out. After a while he turned, muttering, and slammed into his apartment.

By dawn, my roomy Victorian had the look and feel of a curing shed in Raleigh, North Carolina, and smelled like the alley out back of a florist’s shop doused with agent orange. The atmosphere was stifling, barely breathable, the rank wet seething odor of the pot pungent as spilled perfume. It was 107 degrees in the living room. Desert winds roared from the vents, an electric space heater glowed in the corner opposite the crackling fireplace, the fans screamed for oil and we sweated like jungle explorers. As the windows were turning gray we strung up the last of the plants, nearly twenty-four hours after we’d plunged into the fields with our flashing sickles. We were worn out, frayed to the bone. We sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee from cardboard containers and staring off into space. I felt like Sisyphus taking a five-minute break, like Muhammad Ali at the end of the fourteenth round in Manila. Gesh’s head slumped forward, Phil lapped absently at a frosted doughnut. Outside, it was still raining.

I got up and made my way through the vegetation to the living room. Bending to my record collection, I thought back to the night I’d played
The Rite of Spring
and Vogelsang had thumped up the stairs with his mad proposal. The room smelled like a silo, sweat dripped from my nose. I straightened up and put on a record—Strauss’s
Death and Transfiguration.
It could have been my theme song.

The crop dried in five days. During that interval Gesh lay roasting like a pecan on the couch, the perpetual beer clutched in his perspiring hand, while Phil and I escaped the deadly whirling sirocco breezes of the apartment by planting ourselves in the front row of the unheated ninety-nine-cent movie house around the corner, where we regaled ourselves with popcorn that tasted like Styrofoam and a succession of kung fu/slasher/biker/car-chase flicks with Spanish subtitles. Now that I had leisure for it, I also spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying. I worried about the steady wind wafting from my front window
to perfume the entire block with the essence of torrefying pot, I worried about the dark looks my landlord gave me when I ran into him on the front stoop, I worried about the disposition of the U-Haul truck, which we’d somehow neglected to move and which had subsequently been towed away and impounded by municipal drones while we rested from the labors of our harvest. And then of course my personal finances were a mess: rent and utility bills on the apartment had pretty well eaten up my meager savings during the course of my exile, and we were a long way from realizing any profit on the marijuana that littered the apartment from floor to ceiling (we still had to trim, bag and peddle it). Nor could I forget my pending court appearance, though Jerpbak’s demotion could be expected to play in my favor.

I worried about Petra, too. I phoned her several times from the pay phone outside the Cinema Latina, my home phone having been disconnected in my absence, but was unable to reach her. Was she distracted by the roar of the kiln? Was she out digging clay in some remote streambed? Had she left town for good, found a new man, flown to Puerto Vallarta for two weeks in the sun? I didn’t know. Couldn’t guess. I just hung on to the receiver and listened to the flatulent busy signal as if to some arcane code.

Dried, that is deprived of the water weight that composed seventy percent of its bulk, the crop took on an increasingly withered and reduced look. Leaves shriveled, buds shrank. Plants that had been big as Christmas trees now seemed as light and insubstantial as paper kites. On the afternoon of the fifth day we gathered in the saunalike atmosphere of the front room to sample the product and determine its fitness for sale. Phil and I sat sweltering on the couch while Gesh broke a long squirrel’s-tail cola from a brittle branch and pared away the leaves that protruded like tongues from between the flowers. Then he plucked two of the neat fingertip-sized buds from the stem and crumbled them over a creased cigarette paper with a slow circular rub of his palms. No one said a word, the moment as drenched in ritual as a high mass at the Vatican. We watched as he rolled the joint with sacerdotal solemnity, sealed it with a sidelong lick and held it up before our eyes as if he were blessing the host. Sere leaves rustled overhead, the fans hummed and the heat swabbed at the
back of my throat as Gesh struck the ceremonial match and held the joint out to me as to a communicant at the rail. I took it to my lips and inhaled.