Budding Prospects (8 page)

We were awakened by a thunderous pounding at the door—Anne Frank’s moment of truth, the men in the black boots come to drag us away. The sound reverberated through the house, deafening, insupportable, terrifying. We’d done nothing illegal—yet. We had no pot, no seeds even. There was no reason to be alarmed, but we were alarmed. No, not simply alarmed—panicked. I rushed out into the main room in my underwear, heart slamming at my ribs, to see Phil’s stricken face peering from the shadows of the front bedroom. It couldn’t have been later than six-thirty or seven. “Hallo?” a voice boomed. “Is anybody in there?”

“Just a minute,” I called, dancing round the cold floorboards, my nervous system simultaneously flashing two conflicting messages:
Be calm
and
Sauve qui peut.
Phil had vanished. I could hear him thumping into his pants, coins spilling like chimes. Something crashed to the floor. “You’ll—you’ll have to go around to the other door,” I shouted, hugging my shoulders against the cold, “this one’s been …” I hesitated. “This one’s been nailed shut.”

Gesh’s head appeared at the top of the stairwell, between the rails of the crude banister one of our troglodyte predecessors had erected. “Get rid of them,” he hissed. “We can’t have fucking people—“ but he cut himself off in mid-sentence: the kitchen door had begun to rattle.

I reached the door at the same instant it was thrust open, and found myself standing toe-to-toe with the very archetype of the rural American, the living, breathing, foot-shuffling image of the characters who populate the truck stops of America, vote for neo-Nazis and mail off half their income to the 500 Club or the Church of the Flayed Jesus. Rangy, fiftyish, he was dressed in overalls, plaid hunting jacket and a Willits Feed cap. His face was seamed like a soccer ball, a wad of tobacco distended his cheek, he reeked of cowshit and untamed perspiration. “Hallo,” he roared—he could have been greeting someone six miles away—and extended his hand. “Lloyd Sapers,” he said, still too loudly.

“I ranch the place next door?”

I shook his hand gravely, the elastic band of my Jockey shorts
tearing at my flesh like masticating teeth. I was wondering both how to get rid of him and how to indicate, without arousing suspicion, that we were antisocial types who neither sought nor welcomed unannounced visits and least of all friendly relations with our neighbors, when he brushed past me and strode into the room as if he’d just assumed the mortgage on the place.

“Seen the light last night,” he said, drawing himself up and spinning round like a flamboyant prosecutor exposing the sordid and incontrovertible truth to a scandalized world, “heard you, too. Comin’ up the road. All afternoon, it seems like.” And then he laughed, way up in the back of his throat.

Somehow, things had gotten out of hand. Here I was, shivering like a wet dog and dressed only in my underwear, standing in the middle of the dirty, disused kitchen of a shack unfit for human occupation, engaged in a bantering conversation with an utter stranger, a man who by his very presence had to be considered an enemy. The discolored lump over my left eye began to throb. “Look,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, Mr. Sapers, but—”

“Call me Lloyd.”

“—but it’s early, and I—”

He burst out with a laugh so sudden and sharp it startled me. “Early, oh yeah, I’ll bet,” he shouted, and flashed me a knowing grin.

At this point, Phil appeared behind him, shuffling his feet and bobbing his head. His bad eye, I noticed, had gone crazy. Normally it was just slightly out of plumb, but under duress it began to rove as if it had a life of its own. Standing there in the gray light in his rumpled clothes, he could have been an elongated Jean-Paul Sartre contemplating a street full of
merde.

Sapers swung round on him and seized his hand. “Glad to meet you. It’s a pleasure, it really is. Haven’t had nobody out here for thirty years now,” he said, “except for that bonehead that was up here last summer in his house trailer—Smith or Jones or whatever the hell his name was. He was up to no good, I’ll tell you that.” The rancher delivered this information with a sad shake of his head, then pushed his cap back with a sigh that was actually a sort of yodel, and asked if we had any coffee.

I don’t know what I was feeling at that moment—curiosity,
shock, fear, annoyance. That someone else had been up here before us, and that he’d been up to no good—this was news. Who was he? Why hadn’t Vogelsang told us? And what about this nosy old loudmouth who was perched on the edge of the stove now, as comfortable as if he were counting sacks of hog manure in his own living room? We couldn’t afford to have him snooping around—or anybody else, for that matter. But how to get rid of him? Abstractedly, I watched Phil bend to the stove, stoke the embers and lay some scrapwood on top. Then I ducked out of the room to get dressed, as jittery as if I’d swallowed a handful of amphetamines.

When I slapped back into the kitchen, hoisting my pants with one hand and clutching boots and socks in the other, Phil was heating water for coffee and Sapers was rattling on about the property, the weather, his wife, hoof-and-mouth disease, Ronald Reagan, taxes, deer hunting and just about anything else that came to his fevered mind. He was like a man who’d just emerged from six months in solitary, like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, Crusoe with a captive audience: he could not shut up.

As if he’d read my thoughts, our neighbor looked up at that instant and fixed me with a gaze as steady and intense as a stalking predator’s. For an instant I saw something else in him, something raw and calculating, but then his eyes went soft, and he was the grinning bumpkin again. “Sure hope you don’t mind me going on like this, but unless I go into town I don’t have nobody much to talk to, outside of Trudy, that’s my wife, and my son Marlon. And Marlon, he’s a good boy, but he ain’t got much sense, if you know what I mean.” (I didn’t know what he meant, but in time I was to be enlightened on this score, as on a host of others. Marlon was nineteen, he weighed three hundred and twenty pounds, stood six feet tall, wore glasses that distorted his eyes until they looked like tropical fish in a hazy tank, and was so severely disturbed he’d spent the better part of his adolescence in the violent ward of the state mental hospital in Napa.)

Phil fished a can of Medaglia d’Oro from one of the bags of groceries we’d hauled up with us, found a cracked cup in another, and poured the intruder a cup of coffee strained through a paper towel. “This used to be the old Gayeff place, you know,” Sapers said, blowing at his coffee. I wondered how he was going to
manage to drink it and chew tobacco at the same time. “Ivan, now there was a character. Had hair like a nigger on him, kinky and black. A real tippler he was, too. He’d get himself liquored up on a Friday night, whale the piss out of his kids, blacken the old lady’s eyes for her and then run into the woods mother-ass naked and howl like a dog. Ivan the Terrible, we used to call him.”

Suddenly Sapers looked as if he’d been stricken—he turned his head away and nearly dropped his cup. Then he leaned over and spat feebly in the sink. “Oh, but listen,” he stammered, avoiding my eyes, “I didn’t mean to … oh, what the hell: I may as well level with you. Mr. Vogelsang told me what you fellas are doing up here.”

It was as if he’d announced that the place was surrounded. The words drilled into me like slugs, Phil scalded his hand and cursed sharply, I could feel the hairs rising on the back of my neck. “He
what
?”

“Well, naturally. Since we live so close and all, he had to tell me.” The rancher paused to send a mauve stream of tobacco juice into the sink. Then he gulped at his coffee and glanced up tentatively: he’d put his foot in his mouth, and he knew it.

By this time Gesh had appeared, looking terrible. He was scowling, as irascible and dyspeptic as a member of the Politburo, the scar that divided his eyebrow gleaming like the mark of Cain. I thought of the moment in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
when the interloper arrives at the prospectors’ camp and they decide to murder him rather than give up their secret.

If there was blood in the air, Sapers didn’t seem to notice. He shook hands with Gesh, made a jocular reference to Phil’s haircut, spat in his coffee, and proceeded to enlighten us as to the nature and extent of the information he’d received from Vogelsang. The story came out gradually, but as soon as we began to get the drift of it, we played right along. It seemed that Vogelsang, thinking of everything, had told Sapers that he had some friends who were writers—really first-rate, mind you—but that they had a severe and debilitating problem with alcohol. He was going to let them live up at the camp for six or nine months so they could dry out, get some writing done and batten on sunshine
and good clean country living. It was about as lame a story as I’d ever heard.

“Hey,” Phil said, as soon as Sapers paused for breath, “I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve had my problems with the sauce, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m here to straighten out or lay down and die.”

“Amen,” I said.

“Yes, sure,” Sapers boomed, looking relieved. “I had an uncle that used to hit the bottle—Four Roses, quart and a half a day. It’s a disease is what it is. Just like cancer. And I’m shit-for-hell glad to see you boys determined to lick it.”

Without warning, Gesh stepped forward, snatched the cup from the rancher’s hand and flung it against the wall. “Frankly,” he said, his voice curling round a snarl, “I don’t give a shit about your uncle, or you, or your half-assed opinions either. If you think you can come around here, brother, and lord it over us because we might’ve had a problem in the past, well you’re dead wrong, I’ll tell you that right now.”

Sapers seemed to shrink in that instant, his neck as red and thin and sinewy as a turkey gobbler’s, his open shirt big around as a life jacket. Gesh loomed over him like the statue of the Commendatore come to life. “I … I … listen, I never—”

Gesh shouted him down. “We have feelings, too, can you dig that? What do you think we are, some kind of human garbage or something? Huh?” Raging, Gesh jerked the leathery little rancher off the stove, both fists bunched under his collar. “We’re shit, right? Just because we take a drink once in a while? Right? Right?”

Sapers was a man of straw, a bundle of clothes. He seemed to have shrunk away entirely, his essence concentrated in a reddened oval of face, stained teeth and hissing nostrils. “Don’t,” he panted, his hands tugging at Gesh’s wrists. “I drink! I drink myself! Me and Trudy, why—”

But Gesh wasn’t listening. His features were contorted, his shoulders heaving with rage: he pulled Sapers to him like a lover, and then flung out his arms and sent the rancher reeling across the room. “Son of a bitch,” Gesh roared, advancing on him. “Son of a self-righteous, teetotaling, holier-than-thou bitch. I’ll kill you!”

Our partner’s words hung in the air, ringing with the faint reverberations of saucepans and empty bottles, thrumming in our ears, but Sapers wasn’t there to appreciate the sonic aftereffects: he’d slammed through the kitchen door and bolted round the corner of the storage shed like a missionary in the land of the cannibals. We watched him out the kitchen window, jogging across the field, stumbling and then pitching down the slope of the ravine that divided our property from his. When he broke stride to glance over his shoulder and catch his breath, Gesh flung open the window and heaved a Coke bottle at him. “I’ll kick your ass,” Gesh bellowed, shaking his fist, and Sapers was off like a world-class sprinter, knees pumping, head bobbing, cutting a wide wet swath through the weeds until he disappeared in the cleft of the ravine.

As soon as the rancher was out of sight, Gesh slammed the window down and collapsed as if he’d been hamstrung. He looked up at us, a big, shit-eating, Cheshire-cat grin on his face, and then he hooted and beat the floor like a drunken chimp. Phil had to grab hold of a chair for support, I was wiping hilarious tears from my eyes. “Hoo-hoo,” I said, the long double vowels trembling with appreciative vibrato. The kitchen was dingier than ever, last night’s chili-crusted plates in the sink, coffee stains on the wall, the shelves rife with dust and the tiny splayed tracks of rodents, and none of it mattered: we were laughing.

“Critics’ Circle Award,” Phil gasped. “Best impression of a crazed degenerate—”

“—by a crazed degenerate,” I added.

“Ham of the year,” Phil said, applauding.

Gesh folded his arms across his chest, stretched out his legs and leaned back against a thirty-year-old midden of blackened pans, nonreturnable bottles and eviscerated cans. “Shee-it,” he said.s

That night we sat around the wood stove and listened to the rain pick at the Styrofoam on the roof. We were too tired to worry about baths. After routing Sapers and breakfasting on leftover chili, we’d spent the better part of the morning (in a drizzle that softened the landscape till it looked like a Monet, and coincidentally kept us wet as manatees) tinkering with the five-H.P. lawnmower engine that would theoretically furnish us with electricity. We’d approached it with caution. Separated from the mechanism that provided its ens, and bolted to a slab of iron, which in turn rested on a platform of cinder blocks, it was like a monument to a forgotten civilization, no more functional than one of Phil’s junk sculptures. It was cold, it was rusted, it was grease-clogged. There were belts, pulleys, wires, pipes, what I took to be a dynamo, and a thick black cord that looped over the roof of the storage shed and disappeared into the house. A crude metal bonnet protected the apparatus from the elements.

“Gently,” I warned, as Gesh stepped up and gripped the plastic pull handle that was pinned to the top of the engine casing like a bow tie. He hesitated an instant, threw me a glance over his shoulder, and then leaned into the thing as if he were Indian-wrestling a mortal enemy. His arm jerked back three times in quick succession. From deep inside the inert block of metal there was a faint answering clank of gears. Nothing more. Gesh tried the pull half a dozen times before Phil suggested that the engine
might be out of fuel. “Or maybe it’s old gas,” I reasoned. “You know, maybe it’s gone stale or something.”