Budding Prospects (6 page)

Vogelsang startled me. He slammed through the kitchen door, arms laden—coffee pot, pitcher of cream, a platter of eggs in poaching cups flanked by flat red slabs of bacon. He was wound up, so brisk he seemed awkward, each movement an effort to contain the flashes of energy that jerked at his fingers and set his limbs atremble. I thought he was going to lift off the floor and flap round the room like a cockatiel sprung from its cage, but he managed instead to set the platter down and boom a greeting at me. “Felix!” he shouted. “It’s about time.” He was wearing a running suit, chevrons at the shoulders, stripes down the seams of the legs. Too loudly, and far too cheerfully, he informed me that he’d already run seven miles and loaded the back of the pickup with our equipment.

I sat down and began to consume eggs. Vogelsang crouched at the head of the table, lecturing in spasms, alternately gulping fistfuls of garlic pills and ginseng and dosing himself with breath neutralizer. “Picks, shovels, a wheelbarrow,” he said, interrupting himself to swallow a desiccated-liver tablet. “A couple
rolls of barbed wire and a come-along, and two little Kawasakis I’ve just finished overhauling. It’s all in the truck. Plus some odds and ends: an axe, a set of socket wrenches, claw hammer, that sort of thing. Oh: and the two-by-fours and whatnot for the greenhouse. Boyd will be up there at the end of the week, and he’s going to bring up the worm castings and seeds and all the rest in his van.”

Gesh was wearing a torn flannel shirt that featured cowboys with lariats, his hair was in aboriginal disarray and his eyes looked as if they’d been freshly transplanted. He mixed himself another Bloody Mary, threw back two Quaaludes and gave us a sick grin.

“You’ll need the bikes for patrolling the place once you get the crop in—three hundred ninety acres is no putting green, you know—and for handling the irrigation system during the dry months. But the first thing you’ve got to do—and this is vitally important—is to get that fencing up.” Vogelsang paused to shake the vial of breath spray irritably, set it down on the table and fumble in his pocket for another. Phil was reading the sports page. Gesh looked as if he were about to fall into his drink.

Half an hour later we were milling around Vogelsang’s driveway, preparatory to setting off on the four-hour drive to Mendocino County and the wild venue we would tame like the pioneers and prospectors we were. Gravel crunched under our feet. Birds piped and throbbled. Sunlight fell through the trees with a cheering insistence and the air was like milk. Vogelsang was fussing around the vehicles, cinching ropes and rearranging cartons of supplies, but I wasn’t paying him any attention. I was feeling the pulse of things, suddenly aware of that richness of color and texture you take for granted until you see it represented in oils or illuminating the big screen in a darkened theater. The smell of eucalyptus was as sharp as recollection.

Then Vogelsang was pumping my hand. Aorta stood beside him, restored to impermeability behind her layers of makeup and a black vinyl jacket. “Good luck,” Vogelsang said, reasserting his promise to look in on us in a week or so. Phil fired up the vehicle our benefactor had provided for us—an ancient, fender-punched Datsun pickup—and I climbed into the Toyota
beside Gesh. “Where’s the ticker tape?” 1 called, grinning, as I turned over the engine and wheeled up the drive, feeling heroic, poised on the verge of greatness, ready for anything. The gears clattered, I waved my arm off, Phil fell in behind me and Gesh began to snore.

By the time we reached Santa Rosa the sky was the color of dishwater and sunk so low I had to turn the lights on. At Cloverdale, just below the Mendocino County line and fifty miles or so from Willits, our point of reference, it began to rain. Not with a burst of lightning or a roll of thunder, but with the sudden crashing fall characteristic of coastal precipitation.

The hammering on the roof woke Gesh. He said he felt like shit. “Raw and unadulterated,” he added, slitting a cellophane Mandrax packet with his teeth. “How about we stop for a cup of coffee and wait till it clears?”

We watched the water heave down the windows of the Hopland Coffee Shoppe in big scalloped sheets. It was so dark it could have been dusk shading into night. Phil was soaked through—apparently the truck’s window wouldn’t roll up. “Just my luck,” he said gloomily, and asked Gesh for some pharmaceutical help. Gesh, who seemed to have an unlimited supply, slipped him three Quaaludes. I took two. For equilibrium. It was ten-thirty in the morning. We waited until the waitress stopped refilling our coffee cups, shrugged our shoulders and hunched out into the rain.

Willits, the rain-blurred sign announced some fifty minutes later, had a population of 4,120 and stood at an elevation of 1,377 feet. We passed a series of diners, motels and gas stations, Al’s Redwood Room, and a Safeway market. The town seemed contained in a single strip, stretched out along Highway 101 for the convenience of tourists intent on the redwood forests to the north. It was as bleak and barren and uninspiring as an iceberg bobbing in the Bering Sea. Gesh and I caught glimpses of it through the beating windshield wipers. “For the next nine months,” I said, a trace of retardation in my voice as a result of the drug, which shifts your system down a couple of gears into a sort of prehibernatory torpor, “this is our closest urban center.”

“Urban center,” Gesh repeated, his voice as lugubrious as a noseblow. “Shee-it.”

Fifteen miles north of Willits we were to turn off on a blacktop road, follow it past a place called Shirelle’s Bum Steer and six or seven tumbledown farms, and then up a gravel drive to a gate that opened on “five point three miles of unimproved dirt road,” to quote Vogelsang’s directions. Fine. But it was raining so hard we missed the turnoff and Phil nearly slammed into my tail end when I braked to cut a U-turn. I rattled up on the shoulder, hit the emergency flasher and ran back to confer with him.

The intensity of the rain was staggering: I felt I was carrying a sack of potatoes on my back as I jogged the twenty steps to the pickup and poked my head through the open window. Rain tore at the back of my neck and sent exploratory tributaries down the collar of my jacket. A lone logging truck hissed up the highway, spewing water, and vanished in the haze. “What’s the story?” Phil mumbled, each word played out on a string like a yo-yo winding down. The sagging pompadour was flattened across his forehead and a drop of water depended from his nose.

“Vogelsang said fifteen miles from Willits. I read fifteen and a half on my odometer. The road we just passed must be it.”

Phil was shivering. The iris of his wild eye looked like an ice crystal in a cocktail glass. “Christ,” he moaned, “I hope so. All’s I want to do now is sit in front of the fire and crash for a couple hours.”

Shirelle’s Bum Steer greeted us like a shout of affirmation as we lurched across the highway and onto the presumptive road. I could hear Phil honking his joy behind me as we sped past the place—a ramshackle country bar attached to a house in need of paint. A pair of mud-streaked pickups huddled beneath the drooling oak out front, the hand-lettered sign was pitched at a drunken angle, and a single sad Coors neon glowed in the window like a candle at the shrine of a martyr. I took it in at a glance, noting bleakly that this was our nearest outpost of civilization. “The Land of the Rednecks,” Gesh muttered, and added that he felt like Lewis of Lewis and Clark, or maybe it was Clark, and then we were rattling over a raging tributary of the Eel River (in summer it would subside to a series of fetid, mosquito-breeding pools) and threading our way up a valley
between cropped, long-faced hills that bristled with pine like so many unshaven cheeks. We were counting off tumbledown farms and scouring the left-hand side of the road for a block of stone that protruded from the ground like an admonitory finger—our indication to swing into the next road to our right—when Gesh shouted “Eureka!” and I cut hard into a dirt road that was co-incidentally the brown rippling bed of a stream.

Suddenly we were going uphill—climbing a precipice—the tires groping for purchase, water slashing at the fenders, the engine cranking with a propulsive whine and carrying us fifty or sixty feet in a headlong rush before the wheels sank to the hubcaps in a sea of reddish mud. Phil, loaded down with the barbed wire and Kawasakis, was able to develop better traction, and careened wildly up the hill and into the back of the stalled Toyota. I don’t recall the sound effects, whether there was a crunch, a shriek or a thud. But my head flew forward as if on an urgent journey of its own, the windshield groaned and then flowered in silver filigree, and the trunk latch popped open, forever. I looked at Gesh. He was cursing, and there was blood on his forearm.

Then we were all out in the downpour, ankle-deep in mud and roiling water. Trees loomed over us like cupped black hands, the rain lashed our faces with a thousand stings, I rubbed my forehead and discovered that an object the size and consistency of a golf ball had been inserted beneath the skin in the vicinity of my left eyebrow. For a moment we just stood there, hunched like lost souls awaiting the ferry across the river of lamentation, cursing softly. Then Gesh plunged into the undergrowth like an enraged bull, tearing at ferns and briars and poison oak, knocking down saplings, uprooting stumps. I thought he’d gone mad.

Meanwhile, Phil had begun to dance around the road, wringing his hands and rotating his head as if he were trying out an esoteric new routine for Alvin Ailey. “Hey, I didn’t know—“ he began, but I waved him off. “I’m okay,” I said, noting at the same time and with the dispassion of a man in a movie theater watching the
Lusitania
go down, that my duffel bag had been thrown from the trunk and into the center of the streambed. The heavy khaki cloth had gone dark with wet, and debris had
already begun to collect against it. Inside were my shirts, my socks, my underwear, my sweaters. I took hold of the dripping strap and jerked the bag up out of the mud, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process. Phil helped me heave the sodden thing back into the trunk, and together we managed to secure the ruptured latch with a piece of wire.

Suddenly Gesh emerged from the woods, his face cross-hatched with welts and contusions, the trench coat flapping about his knees. He was dragging a downed tree the size of a battering ram. For a moment we just stood there gaping at him, our hands at our sides, rain crashing through the trees, mud swirling at our feet. It was as if we’d just been wakened from a dream of sleeping. “Christ ass,” Gesh shouted, “give me a hand, will you?”

I could feel the drug loosen its grip—think of a crouton drawn from a pot of fondue—and then I was at Gesh’s side, jerking furiously at the wet, moss-covered log. Phil fell in beside me, and we maneuvered the thing alongside the car, then staggered into the undergrowth for another. We worked silently, grunting at one another, each locked in his own thoughts (I was thinking of hot showers, hot soup, electric blankets and thermal underwear). Everything dripped, thorns raked at our wrists and faces, sowbugs crept up our arms, rain hissed in the branches like a stadium packed with disgruntled fans. As Phil and I wrestled with a half-petrified log, Gesh jacked the Toyota out of the mud. “All right, push!” he exhorted, the jack at its apogee, and the three of us leaned into the fender and then jumped back as the car slammed down on the makeshift platform with a percussive splintering crack. Then we jacked up the other side.

There was a smell of slow rot on the air, of mold and compost. Birds mocked us from the trees. Our hands and faces were black with loam, as if we’d been buried and unearthed and buried again. Gesh tried to light a cigarette. His pants were torn at the knee and the trench coat hung from him like a wet beach towel. Phil was clowning. He bent to scoop up a handful of mud and slap it down across the crown of his head, like Stan Laurel at the conclusion of a pie-throwing skirmish. It wasn’t funny. “Okay,” Gesh growled, flinging down the wet cigarette and spreading his big hands across the indented bumper of the Toyota, “why don’t you see what you can do?”

I wiped my hands on the seat of my pants and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was musty and cold, the windows opaque with wet. I turned the key, took note of the answering roar (we’d lost the muffler apparently), and watched the wipers flail at the rain. Then I revved the engine, peeled the bark from the logs and hydroplaned up the road as far as I could go, my co-workers slogging madly behind me like refugees chasing after the Red Cross wagon. When I bogged down, the whole process started over again: heave, haul, crank, shove. Sometimes I’d manage to make a couple hundred feet; other times I’d come wheeling off the log grid and sink instantaneously in the mud. The rain was no help: it fell steadily all afternoon. And we were, as I was later to discover, climbing a vertical drop of something like six hundred feet from the blacktop road to the cabin.

Finally, after four and a half back-breaking hours, we reached a point at which the road began to level out, and when I came off the launching pad for what must have been the twentieth time, I kept going. The car fishtailed right and left, low-hanging branches swooped at the windshield, the cheers of my partners faded in the background, and I kept going. There was a short straightaway, a series of
S
curves and then a wide sweeping loop that brought me up into a rain-screened clearing about the size and shape of a Little League field. I didn’t know where I was going, slashing through swaths of waist-high weed and thumping over frame-rattling boulders and mounds of rusted machine parts, hooked on the idea of momentum …

Until I saw the cabin.

No, I thought, no, this can’t be it, as I slammed on the brakes and skidded into a heap of scrap metal that featured a rusted boxspring and the exoskeleton of the first washing machine ever made. I’d experienced hiatuses between expectation and actuality before—who hasn’t? But this was staggering. Hunting lodge? The place was an extended shack, the yard strewn with refuse, the doorway gaping like an open mouth, like the hungry maw of the demon-god of abandoned houses demanding propitiation. Someone—Vogelsang, no doubt—had nailed tarpaper up on the outer walls in place of shingles, and there was a ridiculous white cloud of sheet Styrofoam lashed across the roof (in the hope of forestalling leaks, as I was later to learn). One thing I was sure
of, even then, sitting stunned behind the fractured windshield of the stalled Toyota: no one had lived in the place for twenty years. Or more.