Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)
T. Coraghessan Boyle
PENGUIN BOOKS
BUDDING PROSPECTS
T. Coraghessan Boyle is a native of Peekskill, New York. He is the author of the novels East is East (1990), World’s End (1987, Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Budding Prospects (1984), The Road to Wellville (1993), and The Tortilla Curtain (1995), as well as four short story collections, Descent of Man (1979), Greasy Lake and Other Stories (1985), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), and Without a Hero (1994). His fiction has appeared in most of the major American magazines including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. He currently lives near Santa Barbara, California.
Budding
ProspectsA
Pastoral
T. Coraghessan Boyle
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1984
Published in Penguin Books 1985
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1984
All rights reserved
EISBN: 9781101573860
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:
Bug Music Group: Lyrics from “Semi-Truck,” by Bill Kirchen and Billy C. Fallow. Copyright © 1980 by Ozone Music (BMI). Administered by Bug Music.
Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from “Truckin’,” music by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh, words by Robert Hunter. Copyright © 1971 by Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc.
Jobete Music Company, Inc.: Lyrics on pages 8 and 9 from “Money (That’s What I Want),” words and music by Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford. Copyright © 1959 by Jobete Music Company, Inc. Used by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
MCA Music: Lyrics from “Satin Sheets,” words and music by John E. Volinkaty. Copyright © 1972, 1973 by Champion Music Corporation, New York, N.Y. Rights administered by MCA Music, a Division of MCA Inc., New York, N.Y. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc.: Lyrics from “So Much Trouble,” words and music by B. McGhee. Copyright © 1952, 1978 by Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc., 6920 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California 90028. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Taco Music, Inc.: Lyrics from “Beat on the Brat,” words and music by The Ramones. Used with permission of the publisher, Taco Music, Inc.
Viking Penguin Inc.: An excerpt from Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. Copyright 1949 by Arthur Miller. Copyright renewed © 1977 by Arthur Miller.
Zora Delta Music: Lyrics from “Farm Blues,” words and music by Robert Williams. Copyright © Zora Delta Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Janson
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is for my horticultural friends.
Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep; and you shall have Corn to sell and to keep.
Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth
“Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.”
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Table of Contents
Part 1: Preparing the Soil
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part 2: Germination
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part 3: Efflorescence
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part 4: Harvest
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART I
Preparing
the Soil
Chapter 1
I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I’d known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn’t give up on was the summer camp.
Let me tell you about it.
Two years ago I was living alone. I woke alone, flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and undressed for bed alone. The universe had temporarily pulled in its boundaries, and I was learning to adjust to them. I was thirty-one. I sat at the lunch counter with men of fifty-one, sixty-one, eighty-one, slurped tomato-rice soup and watched the waitress. Sometimes I had dinner with friends, shot pool, went to the aquarium, danced to a pulsing Latino beat in close, atramental clubs; sometimes I felt like a bearded ascetic contemplating the stones of the desert.
On this particular night—it was in late February—I stayed in. I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record—Le Sacre du Printemps—caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame. I looked up from my book. Rain knocked at the windows like a smirking voyeur, small sounds reverberated through the house—the clank of the refrigerator closing down, the sigh of the heat starting up—the fire crackled ominously round a nail in a charred two-by-four. At that instant, as if on cue, the front buzzer sounded. It was after twelve. I gave the tube a rueful glance—zombies in white-face drifted across the screen, masticating bratwurstlike strings of human intestine—put down my book, cinched the terrycloth robe round my waist, and ambled to the head of the stairs. Insistent, the buzzer blatted again.
My apartment was a walkup on Fair Oaks, three blocks west of the Mission. The house was a Victorian, painted in six colors. I had four rooms, a deck, a hallway and a view. Before the intercom
went dead, the signal had become so weak and static-jammed I wouldn’t have recognized my mother’s voice—or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins doing “I Put a Spell on You,” for that matter. I stood at the head of the stairway and pressed the door release, more curious than apprehensive, and watched three shadows dodge in out of the wet.
There was a flash of lightning, horns and violins shrieked and reshrieked the same tortured Slavic measure like a tocsin, they were coming up the stairs, thump-thump-thump. For one nasty moment I stepped back, cursing myself for so blindly buzzing them in—gray forms, strangers, junkies, Mexican confidence men—when I saw, with relief, that it was Vogelsang. “Felix,” he said.
“Hey,” I responded.
He had a girl in tow, her hair clipped short as an East German swimmer’s and bleached white. Behind her, three steps down, a guy in his late twenties, wearing rubbers and a yellow rain slicker that gave off a weird phosphorescent glow in the dull light of the hallway. All three of them looked as if they’d jumped off the Bay Bridge four or five times: noses dripping, hair plastered, water dribbling from collars and shoes. Vogelsang was grinning his deranged grin. “It’s been a while,” he said, clapping my shoulder.
It had been two months. Vogelsang lived in splendid isolation in the hills above Bolinas, making money nefariously, practicing various perversions, collecting power tools, wood carvings, barbers’ poles and cases of dry red wine from esoteric little vineyards like Goat’s Crouch and Sangre de Cristo. He also collected antique motorcycles, copper saucepans, espresso machines the size of church organs, sexless mannequins from the fifties (which he painted, lacquered and arranged round the house in lewd, arresting poses), bone-handled knives, Tahitian gill nets and a series of cramped somber oil paintings devoted to religious themes like the decapitation of John the Baptist or the algolagnic ecstasies of the flagellants. Every few weeks he would descend on San Francisco to prowl junk shops, cruise North Beach and attend sumptuous mate-swapping parties in Berkeley. Norman Mailer would have loved him.
At this juncture, he maneuvered the girl forward. I noticed that she was wearing a delicate silver ring through the flange of her right nostril, and that her toenails were painted black. “This is Aorta,” Vogelsang said. I labeled her instantly: sorority girl cum punk. She was probably from Pacific Heights and her real name was something like Jennifer Harris or Heather Mashberg. She gave me a hard look and held out her hand. Her hand was as wet and cold as something fished out of a pond. I ducked my head at her and sucked back the corners of my mouth.
“And this,” Vogelsang was saying, gesturing toward the slickered figure three steps down, “is Boyd Dowst, a friend of mine from Santa Rosa.”
The rain slicker seemed to erupt in response, and a big bony hand lunged over the top of the rail to grasp mine. I was staring into the face of a Yankee farmer, angular, big-eared, eyes the color of power-line insulators: “Now living in Sausalito,” he said, clawing at his dripping hair with his free hand. The other hand, the friendly one, was still pumping at mine as if he expected my fingertips to squirt milk or something.
I was barefoot, my bathrobe was dirty, the skipping record ripped at my nerves like a two-man saw. I invited them in.
Vogelsang strode into the living room, unzipped his sodden jacket and draped it across the back of a wooden chair, characteristically brisk and nervous in the way of a feral cat attuned to the faintest movements, the tiniest scratchings. He smelled of rain and something else too, something musky and primal. It was a minute before I realized what it was: he reeked of sex. When he’d arranged the jacket to his satisfaction, he turned to enlighten me on this and other matters, pausing only to produce a plastic vial of breath neutralizer and squeeze off two quick shots before launching into a monologue describing his recent acquisitions, touching on improvements to his property in Bolinas and the progress of his investments in the commodities market, and giving a lubricious play-by-play account of the urbane orgy he and the girl had attended earlier in the evening. He spoke, as he always did, with a peculiar mechanical diction, each word distinct and unslurred, as if he were a linguistics professor moderating a panel discussion on the future of the language.
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:
The best things in life are free
But you can save them for the birds and bees,
Give me money, that’s what I want.©
“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 an
d 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.
