Budding Prospects (46 page)

Vogelsang accepted this with his bemused little schoolmaster’s smile. Then, shaking his head as if I’d just misconstrued some basic theorem at the blackboard, he circled round me to the open door. “Mind if I shut this?” he said, sliding it closed. “Cold, you know?”

I’d backed off a step or two, and found myself wedged between a bust of Oscar Wilde and a potted palm; somewhere at the periphery of my consciousness the goatherd’s serenade slipped into a sort of slow, clangorous threnody. Vogelsang strode back across the room, barefoot, his calves creased with muscle, looking as if he’d just taken two out of three falls for the championship. I felt the bitterness in me like a hot wire. “But how could you?” I demanded. “I mean, what’s the point? You use somebody to make a few extra bucks for yourself like, like …” I was worked up, spilling over, bad brew. “What do you think you are, some fucking robber baron or something?”

Vogelsang settled into his chair, the inflammatory smirk still creasing his lips, and gestured for me to have a seat. He was in control now and he knew it. Unruffled, composed, calm as a pasha sated with figs and partridges whose sole worry was to relieve himself of a bit of gas before calling for his dancing girls, he fiddled with the sash of his robe, lifted the glass to examine his wine and then tipped it to his lips for a leisurely sip. I wanted to snatch a thick-knobbed femur from the table and drive it into his skull. I ignored the chair. I stood. Like a pillar.

“And what did you get out of it, anyway?” I said, digging in, trying to nettle him, my anger and frustration building in proportion to his calm. “Subtract for that bloodsucker Jones and your share’s going to be worth less than fifteen thousand bucks—you went and screwed us and you’re not even going to make your expenses back. You’re hurting, too. You lost. For once in your life, you lost.” My voice was stretched like wire, a whine, a taunt. I was a benchwarmer ragging the home-run hitter who’s just struck out, a playground brat with a mouthful of orthodonture jeering from the stands. I was getting personal.

And that was it, the key I’d been looking for, the way in. Vogelsang’s smirk suddenly fell in on itself. I could call him a cheat and a liar all night and it was Brer Rabbit in the briar patch—he throve on it; it fed his self-concept; he was the wheeler-dealer, the manipulator, the crafty, tough, amoral éUUbermensch who rises above the grasping herd to prevail—but to be accused of failure, called a dupe, a loser, was more than he could bear. I’d hit home. Bull’s-eye. “Face it,” I said, twisting the arrow, “you’re a loser.”

“No, Felix”—his tone had changed, the amusement dried up —“you’re a loser. You and Cherniske and that other halfwit. And Dowst, too. I made out, don’t you worry.”

What was he talking about? He’d made nothing, he’d made a mistake. “Bullshit,” I said.

Suddenly he was on his feet, catty, clonic, the old Vogelsang. He paced to the end of the table and swung round. “I bought that property in February, like I told you. But not this February. February two years ago. You know what I paid?”

I knew nothing. I was a loser.

“Ninety-two.”

Chink-doom
, went the goatherd,
doom-doom.

“You know what I’m getting—what I
got
? Already?” The cords stood out in his neck like stitches in a sweater. “I signed over the title yesterday—the deal’s been cooking for months. Months.” He was twitching, jerking, dancing in place like an Indian whooping over the corpse of an enemy. “One-seventy. And do you know why? Because you improved the place for me.”

I sat down. Hard.

“That’s right. I had a deal with Sapers—and don’t give me that look, I played straight with you: he knew nothing about the pot. If I fenced the property line he’d let me tap into his electricity. I told him my writer friends would do it for the exercise.”

A cavern was opening up inside me, a pit, a chasm in which I could hear the faint reverberations of all the coppers, pennies, yen, groschen, forints and centavos of all the sad, grasping, multifarious generations as they plunged into the everlasting gloom.

“And I’ll tell you something else. I’ll do a little work on that Jeep and that pickup and I’ll unload them for more than what I paid for them. The PVC pipe is stacked in the garage right now. The generator and pump, too.” He’d moved closer now, his fingers dancing on the tabletop. The smaller skull was in his hand—alas, poor Yorick—and he was gesturing with it. “Don’t be naive, Felix,” he said in a voice that could have humbled the chairman of the board at ITT, “don’t be stupid. I don’t lose.”

My own voice was a croak, a dying crippled thrust of rebuke. “Jones. He
was
your man. You got together to cheat us.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Rudy.”

He held the skull up before his face and gazed into the empty eye sockets; I thought he was going to crush it, but he set it down gently beside its mate and fussed over the arrangement for a moment before responding. “Rudy made a bad investment,” he said. “Jones is a leech.” And then: “Jones figured it out, that’s all. He talked to Rudy, he saw you and Gesh when you were in town. I assume he made a little reconnaissance trip up to the property to check things out and then he decided to squeeze us.”
Vogelsang’s eyes went hard with the thought of it. “I guess he figured I owed him something.”

I rose slowly from the chair, feeling the tug of gravity like a gouty old pensioner with an inner tube of fat round the middle, like an arthritic horse or elephant about to receive the coup de grace. The load was too heavy, the taint too deep. I was digging a garden, thinking turnips and corn and fat, dewy beefsteak tomatoes, turning over the earth and finding garbage, layer upon layer of it, reeking, alive with the seething white ferment of decay. “But we were friends, weren’t we?”

He shrugged. “I offered you a deal. You could have said no.”

“You didn’t have to lie to me, use me like something you wipe your ass with.”

“Oh, come on, Felix, drop the martyr act, will you? It’s wearing thin. Just because I offer you a deal doesn’t mean I have to lay out my whole financial history and give you the FDIC seal of approval, does it? You didn’t ask me for a prospectus when I told you to buy zirconium, did you? I’ve made you money. And don’t forget, you put up nothing on this project. None of you did. I’m the one who bought the land and put up the capital, I’m the one who gave you the chance to make it.”

“We were doomed from the start.” All the blood seemed to have left my head. I felt like a moth sucked dry in the spider’s web. “You said two thousand plants, one thousand pounds. But you knew damned well we’d have to start with four thousand plants to wind up with two. I mean, you and Dowst come breezing into my living room and make it sound like you’re laying half a million dollars in my lap or something, when all along—”

He was holding up his palm. “No, no. I wanted it to go—I really thought it would, I believed in it. Why else would I even bother to set it up? Boyd’s the one. I relied on him and he let me down.” Vogelsang was calmer now: the threat had passed. He’d let me know, low as I was, that he was that much higher—he’d taken a couple of shots below the belt maybe, but he’d gone the distance and he was still the champ. “That was my biggest mistake,” he said after a pause, “—trusting Dowst.”

I just looked at him, stupidly, obtusely, the slow learner in a class of whiz kids.

“He swore he could come up with the seeds. And that half a pound per plant was the
low
estimate anyway, figuring for unviable seeds and bad weather and all the rest, that even if we ran into problems we should get a pound or more out of most of them. Plus he looked the place over and assured me he could grow a forest up there, a jungle—no problem.”

This was funny. Vogelsang was showing his teeth in appreciation, the bobcats were madly whirling, and the goatherd abruptly gave up his dirge for the merry
scritch-scratch-scritch
of the stalled stylus. But there was something else, too. A titter. From the shadows. I jerked my head round and saw, in the far corner of the room, the bare pale outline of a human figure hunched down on the couch. When she stood and moved toward the turntable to change the record, I saw with a shock that this was Aorta, naked still, rising from the dark corner like a naiad rising from her pool, and that her hair was bleached white and cropped close as ever. Buttocks, breasts, nipples, thighs, the tattoo on her left flank (a scorpion?)—each was like a jab in the arm, a skipped heartbeat. But what made me drop my lower lip and gape like a defective was that broad hacked bristling blue stripe that cut a swath through her hair.

I blinked at Vogelsang, dumbfounded. He was still smiling—or rather lifting his lip back from his teeth in the weird strained way of a Bible salesman or a friend of the opera. Was I going crazy? I glanced again at Aorta as she stood fussing with the record on the far side of the room, and then, with dawning comprehension, swiveled my head a hundred and eighty degrees to stare at the hard, cold, unrevealing slab of the kitchen door.

The door swung open at that moment, as if on cue, and she stepped into the room and came toward us, grinning hesitantly, showing off those fine even little baby’s teeth and the pink ripple of gum. She balanced a tray in one hand and held an open beer in the other. The kimono had fallen open partially, and I could see the slant of one little tittie, and below, a glimpse of pale pubic fuzz. Makeup, haircut, height, weight, walk, she could almost have been Aorta’s twin—but I knew her now, knew her instantaneously, knew her with a rush of amaze, envy, hatred and lust that came like the first jolt of electroshock. “Savoy,” I whispered.

The tray held delicacies—smoked oysters, artichoke hearts, the black spittle of caviar—an antipasto. Or anticoito. I watched her eyes as she set the tray down among the bones, beside the half-empty bottle and the three glasses. She gave me a single sharp, brazen look, brazen and triumphal both, and then slipped her arm round Vogelsang’s waist. “Hi,” she said. She was smiling, though her lip trembled just perceptibly. “Long time no see.”

If the state of shock is a deep sleep of the senses that protects us in our cores from the sharp edges of the world, then I was deeply thankful for it at that moment. I felt it come over me like a blanket, like a drug, felt my lips go numb, my eyes glaze. I wasn’t thinking of perfidy, rottenness, greed: I was thinking nothing.

“It’s not what you think, Felix,” Vogelsang said. He looked embarrassed, caught with his hand in the jar; he grinned till the long pale roots of his teeth showed. “I never laid eyes on her till you sent me down there to talk to her. I swear it.”

“My mother’s an asshole,” Savoy said, as if we’d been discussing mothers and assholes for the past fifteen minutes.

“I made a deal with her. An arrangement. She wanted out of little Appalachia and I told her she could come stay here with me and Aorta if she’d back off the project.”

I was aware of a movement to my left. Aorta had come up and was standing at my elbow, stark naked. We made a foursome, I realized, a grouping, huddled round the scattered bones and the tray of goodies like actors in a necrophilic epic plotting out the next coupling. Music was playing, something I didn’t recognize, percussive, nasty, like the hissing of adders. I glanced at Aorta. Her expression was noncommittal. I felt drunk. My face was on fire, my groin throbbing.

“Eugene’s an asshole, too,” Savoy said.

Vogelsang reached for his wineglass, breaking the tableau, Aorta scratched herself absently and reached for a cracker, Savoy threw back her head to take a swig of beer. Uneasy on my heels, my eyes riveted to Aorta’s crotch, navel, nipples, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and backed off a step. It was then that I caught the scent of it. Rank, hot, urgent, it was the odor of sex, the musky perfume Vogelsang and Aorta had been wearing the
night we’d lifted our glasses to the success of the summer camp. I snuffed it like a tomcat, like a caveman, and it had a rotten edge to it. The bones lay on the table, Aorta was watching me, the music hissed in my ears, and I hated them all. I hated cabals, plots, schemes, hated the hungry clawing fornicating faces of the world, I hated myself.

I turned and made for the door, for the smell of eucalyptus, the night, the wind, medicine for my hurts. My hand was on the latch. “Felix,” Vogelsang said, and I paused to look back at him. “You can stay if you want.”

I didn’t want.

Across the redwood planks, legs pulling me along, legs and feet, past the fallen mannequin and down the steps the way I’d come. A wind had risen to shake the trees. I was around the corner of the house when I heard his voice coming at me—he must have been standing at the door. “The calendar,” he shouted, “it was only a joke.”

I don’t know how long I sat in the car. Ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? The wind drove in off the ocean, steady as a hand, the moon lay across the hood of the car like a cheap bauble. I was thinking. Of chinless Rudy, of Jones, Vogelsang and Savoy, all the stingers and stingees of the world, all the beat deals, the scams and the hustles, and I realized how precious little it all mattered. Go for it, they said, get it while you can, early to bed and early to rise. Well, I’d gone for it and now I was out of work, out of money and out of luck, I had a trial coming up and no place to live, and I felt like an emotional invalid, like a balloon without the helium. I sat there, getting cold, and I thought of Phil and Gesh back in the apartment clipping away at the shreds of their yachts and restaurants with scissors that grew duller by the moment.
Money, give me money.
Then I thought of Petra. No, I saw Petra. Her hands, sunk in the raw clay, kneading it like bread, molding it, pulling the hard, lasting stuff from its shifting, shapeless core. Wet, yielding, fecund: I could smell the clay, I could feel it.

I slipped the key into the ignition and started the car with a roar that sounded like applause, like a hundred thousand hands
clapping in the dark. Then I backed out from under the shadow of Vogelsang’s gate, wound my way up the driveway and past the ghostly stripped trunks of the eucalyptus trees, and turned north, for Willits, a long rainy winter ahead of me, time to think things over, break some new ground, and maybe even—if things went well—to plant a little seed.