Budding Prospects (25 page)

Petra’s voice was soft. “Don’t do this,” she said.

“License and registration.”

“All right,” she said. “I forgot my license. It’s at home somewhere.”

I watched the back of Jerpbak’s head, studied the square of his shoulders. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take you in then,” he said. Take her in? I was stunned. The man’s psychotic, I thought. A bullyboy. A brownshirt.

“Shit!” Petra shouted, flinging herself from the car. “You know goddamn well I have a license—you’ve harassed me enough over it, haven’t you? How many tickets have you given me in the last three months? Huh? What do you mean I don’t have a
license?” She was six inches from him, veins standing out in her neck, eyes throwing punches.

Jerpbak never flinched. He just stood there, erect as a ramrod, idly fingering the buffed leather of his holster and the hard plastic grip of his revolver. His voice was almost weary. “Up against the car,” he said.

She hesitated; he grabbed for her arm. Just that: he grabbed for her arm, and then spun her around. I don’t know what came over me—some misguided chivalric impulse, I suppose, or perhaps it was even more basic than that, something archetypal, primordial.
Kill, fuck, eat
, the id tells us, and sometimes we listen. In this instance it was all tied up with sex, of course. Would I have interfered if Petra had looked like Edith Sitwell or Nancy Reagan? I stepped forward. I think I said something penetrating like “Hey, no need to get rough,” and I may have reached out with the hazy notion of restraining Jerpbak’s arm—or no, I merely brushed him, that’s all. Accidentally.

Brushing, restraining—I could have clubbed him with the lug-wrench and it wouldn’t have been any different. One hundred and twenty seconds later I found myself handcuffed to Petra and seated in the rear of the cruiser, my wrist aching, knees cramped, heart hammering, and facing a probable string of charges ranging from interfering with a peace officer in the line of duty to assault, mayhem and attempted murder. The police radio chattered tonelessly, inanely, sun screamed through the windows. I watched as Jerpbak sauntered up to the Toyota and shook Gesh awake. I was as wrought up as a pit bull with blood in his nostrils.

Petra’s free hand reached out to pat my shackled one. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were wide and wet, stricken like the eyes of tear-gas victims. “It’s just that … this guy is crazy. He thinks that I … he, he persecutes me.” She leaned into me, and I could feel her body percolating with hurt and anger until the first sob rose in her throat. A moment later she broke down, sobs churning like waves on a beach, the very frame of the car heaving with the force of her emotion. I’d been thinking wildly of escape, of smashing Jerpbak and running for it, and then more somberly of lawyers and jail cells, the collapse of the summer
camp and of how now, finally and irrevocably, I’d let my partners down—thinking of my own circumscribed and miserable self. Now, without thought or hesitation, as instinctively as I would reach out a hand to someone who’d fallen or hold open the door for a child with an armful of groceries, I drew up my free hand to take her shoulder and press her to me. What else could I have done?

I was advised of my rights, photographed, fingerprinted, relieved of my personal property and consigned to the local jail, where I was escorted to a communal cell occupied by two happy-hour drunks, an acne-ravaged shoplifter, a vagrant Indian, and a middle-aged man who had assaulted his seventy-five-year-old mother in a dispute over a can of sugar-free Dr Pepper. I was charged with interfering with the duties of a peace officer and assault and battery. Bail was set at $2,000.

The cell was big, fitted out with Murphy cots, tile floor (easy to hose down, like a cage at the zoo), and two crappers. The Indian—I thought at first he might have been one of the pool players from Shirelle’s—was leaning against the bars, dragging on a cigarette, as I stumbled into the cell. A toothpick jutted from his mouth, and his eyes were like cups of blood. The others sat or lay on their cots in silence, gripped by the peculiar lassitude that sets in when the cell door clanks shut and you find yourself locked away and powerless. After a moment the Indian nodded at me and said, “What they get you for?”

I was feeling stupid, ashamed, guilty. I’d acted impulsively, foolishly, replaying my first encounter with Jerpbak to the letter, déeAjéaG vu. I wanted to hang myself, throttle Jerpbak, make love to Petra, Chinowa, poor dead Annie, I wanted to sit around the table at the summer camp and drink gin rickeys with Phil and Gesh and even Dowst; I did not want to hunker down behind
the broomhandle-thick bars of the Willits jail and open up my heart to a vagrant Indian. “Murder,” I said.

The Indian’s lower lip protruded until it entirely obscured the upper, and he nodded his head slowly and solemnly. No one else said a word to me until Phil came to bail me out six hours later.

Six hours. For six hours I lay on my cot and listened to the tortured ratchetting snores of the drunks and the
mea culpas
of the mother-beater ("Mama,” he moaned at regular intervals, “Mama, forgive me"); for six hours I reflected on my crime and its consequences for the summer camp, and tried to focus the image of Petra, already dissolving in my memory like a teaspoon of sugar in a water tank. There were the distant echoes of footsteps, blown noses, cleared throats. A single yellow bulb burned in the hallway. “What they get you for?” the Indian asked the shoplifter.

In the car on the way in, and while we sat shackled wrist to wrist in the anteroom of the Willits Police Department, Petra had given me an insight into Jerpbak that made my blood boil. Not that I wasn’t already coddling with fear, excitement and rage, my nervous system like a leaky gas jet over which someone was fumbling with a pack of matches, but this was a real provocation, this was heinous: Jerpbak had sexually harassed her. I was outraged and disgusted. He was no ascetic, no true believer—he was venal, an extortionist, an amatorial strong-arm man. He was a sinner like the rest of us.

It seemed that Petra had first run afoul of him shortly after he’d been transferred to the eastern Mendocino region. He’d stopped her for a routine check, stopped her because he was bored, because she was a pretty girl and he was a lean, tough, sinewy, head-cracking, doper-busting, macho highway patrolman. I pictured him—the jackbooted swagger, the short-sleeved shirt with the chevron on the shoulder, the iron triceps and rigid spine—as he ambled up to the car. Petra was ready for him. She held out her license and registration like offerings, like tribute, and concentrated on the nervous chatter of her car’s engine. “What’s this?” he said, stooping to lean in the window and slip back his sunglasses like a knight lifting his visor. “My license and registration,” Petra said, glancing up at him. His hair was
fine, parted at the side and cut close in what used to be called a regular haircut; equally fine hairs flattened along his forearm as a truck whooshed by on the highway. “I don’t want to see those,” he said, holding her eyes. “I just want to chat a minute, that’s all.”

He chatted. Came on strong, made a stab at wit (Petra didn’t elaborate, but I could guess what passed for wit in Jerpbak’s circle—adolescent double entendre gleaned from sitcoms and game shows). Petra didn’t respond. “Can I go now?” she asked finally.

Jerpbak again held her eyes, Jerpbak the hound, the married man, the former star halfback, and lowered his voice to a seductive whisper: “Only if you’ll let me take you to dinner some night this week.”

Three days later he appeared in her shop. “Hi,” he said, dressed in civvies that looked like a uniform—white pants, polo shirt, the inevitable shades. “Remember me?” She again rebuffed him, and he stormed out of the shop like a wounded buffalo; thereafter, Petra was prominent on his shitlist. In due course he discovered that in addition to making mugs, saucers, plates, cream and sugar dispensers, flower pots, bowls and pickle trays, she also made stoneware bongs for a head shop in San Francisco. This gave him a foothold, an angle, a justification for putting pressure on her. She was now, in his view, a blot on the community, an undesirable engaged in an activity if not actually illegal, then certainly reprehensible and corrupting.

Shortly thereafter he stopped her as she was driving off to an arts and crafts fair, her Volkswagen laden with bulky frangible pieces, and conducted a search of the car while writing out a sheaf of violations. He asked her if she wasn’t aware that narcotics implements such as she produced were commonly used by minors. He asked her if she had no sense of morals or community responsibility. Finally, after she’d been delayed over half an hour and was exasperated to the point of tears, he offered to tear up the tickets if she’d agree to go out with him just once. She refused. “All right,” he said, sunglasses snapped down to shield his face as if he were preparing for battle, “but you’re going to regret it.”

From across the cell, the shoplifter’s voice twitched with the
modulations of the hormonal imbalance. “Shoplifting,” he said.

“Me,” the Indian said, “I’m in here for nothing. Breathing, that’s all. I’m in here because I don’t own a Lincoln Continental.”

There were footsteps in the hallway, I heard the clank of a metal door and then a voice calling out my name. I jumped up. The big medieval key rattled in the lock. “Nasmyth,” the voice repeated. “Come with me.”

Phil was waiting for me in the anteroom. He clutched a bulging business envelope in one hand and he was grinning sheepishly, as if he were the one who should be apologizing. The office was small and cramped; the night-shift cop sat at his desk shuffling papers and looking worn and weary. Phil embraced me in the traditional back-slapping way, then counted out twenty crisp one-hundred-dollar bills for the man at the desk, folded the receipt away in his wallet, and led me out the door. “You all right?” he said.

I mumbled a reply, hangdog, mortified, not knowing what to say. Gone were the visions, fled the dreams. I felt I’d let everyone down, felt that I alone had stuck the pin in our balloon and destroyed what nosy neighbors, hostile townsfolk, anarchic bears and inclement weather couldn’t. How could we go on now? I’d attracted the notice and aroused the enmity of Jerpbak. The summer camp was dead.

We climbed into the Toyota in silence. Phil drove. He insisted on it, in fact, treating me like an invalid, as if the six hours I’d spent behind bars had so sapped me I was unable to depress the pedals or manipulate the shift lever. He left the police station headed in the wrong direction, made several stops—for cigarettes, for gas, for an It’s It—pulled in and out of driveways, looped back on himself, and finally emerged from an obscure dirt road just opposite Shirelle’s Bum Steer. For a long while we merely sat there, the engine idling raggedly, as he studied the blacktop and peered into the rearview mirror with the intensity of a U-boat captain lining up a target on his periscope. Then, without warning, he hit the accelerator and the Toyota leapt out onto the roadway like a drag racer. Phil glanced at me in the rushing darkness. “Evasive action,” he explained.

It was the first thing either of us had said since we’d left the police station. We’d been lost in our own thoughts, measuring
out the sentence of doom, trying to accommodate ourselves to disappointment and failure. “So how’s Vogelsang taking it?” I said.

I studied Phil’s profile in the glow of the dashboard. It was unrevealing. He was all nose, chin and Adam’s apple, like a caricature. I thought at first he might be suppressing a grin, but I couldn’t be sure—he might have been frowning, too. Just then the tires squealed, we lurched around a corner and slowed as we hit the pitted surface of the road up to the summer camp. Phil shrugged. “He’s up there now, waiting for you. Everybody’s in a panic.”

“Look,” I began, and the weight of what I was about to say nearly choked me, “maybe I ought to quit the project. I mean, get out of everybody’s way. You guys don’t really need me now that the heavy stuff’s over with.”

The car shivered on its worn springs, bushes scraped at the side panels with the rasp of knives on a whetstone. “You don’t have to do that,” Phil said, his voice soft. He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “We’ll work something out.”

It was two a.m. We rumbled into the field in front of the house and jerked to a halt beside Vogelsang’s Saab. It was a moonless night, stars high and cold like pinpricks in the fabric of the universe. There was the usual chorus of nocturnal insects, the uncertain hump of Dowst’s van and the shadowy displacement of space that indicated the pickup and Jeep. I glanced up and saw that all the windows of the cabin were aglow.

I’d been gone a little over sixty hours. Gesh and I had clambered into the car on Friday like escapees from the chain gang, like troupers boarding the bus for home after a tour of Piscagoula, Little Rock and Des Moines. Now it was Monday morning, and I was back. For months I’d been desperate to leave the place, ticking off the days like a prisoner in solitary, looking up from shovel or come-along and seeing cement, brick and asphalt, lying in my sweaty sheets and dreaming of cold beers, hot showers, checkered tablecloths and discerning waiters; but now, as Phil and I mounted the steps of the porch, I felt I’d come home. It was odd. In a moment we would push through the door to dirt, heat, chaos, to the feeble glow of Coleman lanterns and the scuff of lizards on the wall—and it would be all right. Suddenly I
was crushed with regret. I was going to have to face them all—Vogelsang, Dowst, Aorta, Gesh, Phil, my co-workers and comrades—and tell them I was going to quit. Walk out with nothing. Sacrifice myself for the good of all. I didn’t know what I’d do if they took me up on it.

The door swung open and four faces turned to look up at me as if I were a specimen in the zoo. There was a stink of rancid garbage, insects batted at the Coleman lanterns, shadows clung to the corners. My business partners were seated at the kitchen table, ranged round the Monopoly board, beleaguered by coffee cups, an empty rum bottle, brightly colored cards, the spurious lucre of the game’s treasury. They looked anxious. And tired. I couldn’t help noticing that Vogelsang held the deeds to half a dozen properties, had accumulated a mountain of cash and erected hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. Gesh picked up a
Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go
card as we stepped in the door.