Budding Prospects

Chapter 1

Let me tell you about dirt.

Brown dirt, red dirt, black dirt, yellow dirt. Dirt that sucks at your shoes, blackens your fingernails and seams the creases of your hands, dirt that dries to dust on the faded linoleum and settles in your lungs at night. Friable dirt, liquid dirt, dirt clods, bombs and bricks, sandy dirt, loamy dirt, dirt that reeks of corruption and slow rot. Dirt. The foundation of all things, the beginning and the end. We are made of dirt, not water, and in dirt we shall lie. At the summer camp we ate dirt, washed with dirt, slept in dirt in dirty sleeping bags; at the summer camp, no doubt about it, we lived close to the soil.

You don’t encounter true dirt in the city, with its shoulder-to-shoulder buildings, its cement and its blacktop. But it is there — down in the sub-basement like a nasty primordial secret, clenched in the strangled roots of the trees, crushed beneath the heaving floor of the Bay itself. Dirt is problematic in the city, an element you perceive theoretically, intellectually. You don’t become aware of it on the experiential level until you dive for a Frisbee on the tame suburban grass of Golden Gate Park, and there it is — dirt — on the calf of your white pegged jeans. Or you come down in the morning to find minuscule grains of black dust on the windshield of your car, or take a stroll past a building site and see some actual raw hard-core dirt exposed like a cavity in a rotten tooth. Dirt, you say to yourself, how about that? Still, it’s an anomaly, an exception to the rule. You think about air in the city. You think about water, gasoline, broken glass and dog shit. But not dirt. Dirt just isn’t relevant.

It was relevant that first night at the summer camp.

We found ourselves in the purlieus of nowhere, cold, hungry, exhausted and wet, our hair, skin and clothing layered with mud, which is of course simply protean dirt. Disappointment choked us. Weltschmerz glinted in our eyes. Our hands were black as potatoes dug from the ground, black as the hands of the mechanic I’d known in New York when I was selling insurance. He’d held up his hands to me one afternoon as I came in to reclaim my car. “See these hands?” he said. I looked. The skin was uniformly black, as if it had been dyed or tattooed, the nails were gone, black callus gave way to gray. “You think you got it bad,” he said. “At least you don’t have to get your hands dirty.” It was a revelation: ineradicable dirt, stigmatic dirt, dirt as an unbridgeable social barrier. I’d tried to picture him at the Waldorf or Gracie Mansion, making polite conversation and passing the croissants with hands that looked as if they’d been exhuming corpses. Now, and for the next nine months, we’d know how he felt.

A gust of wind rattled the windows. I shivered. We needed heat, we needed hot water, we needed soap. Phil pried some rusted two-penny nails from a sagging outbuilding and nailed the door shut, while Gesh kindled the fire with his lighter and then hunted up a Coleman lantern. I didn’t know what to do. Voodoo drums were pounding in my ears, a fist beat at my stomach, the witchery of the calendar as unsettling as an effigy transfixed with pins. I couldn’t help it: I was shaken.

“Come on, man,” Gesh said, wadding up newspapers and feeding them into the stove, “snap out of it. You know as well as I do the whole thing is just that shithead Vogelsang’s idea of a joke — big laugh, you know?”

It was true that Vogelsang had been up to the property at least twice already, and true, too, that his sense of humor was skewed, to say the least. I remembered the newspaper file he’d once produced for me. A manila folder crammed with the responses to ads he’d placed in The Berkeley Barb and The Bay Guardian. One of the ads read “Man or Beast? Love Animals … But Love Them the Right Way,” and gave a P.O. box number. He received twelve responses, one of which came from a male zookeeper who expressed a fondness for big cats and whips, and another of which invited him to spend the weekend on a sheep ranch in Marshall. Still another gave the vital statistics on a wire-haired pointer named Rex, suggested a liaison, and was cosigned with a woman’s name and the print of the dog’s right forepaw. Vogelsang never told me if he accepted.

And then of course there were the stuffed animals and the mannequins and all the rest. Yes, I thought, he’s capable of it — and I even pictured him digging the old calendar out of the storage shed, his face lighting with perverse inspiration as he circled the date and nailed the thing to the wall. But in the same instant I felt the tug of superstition, and I saw an unknown hand, three decades back, painstakingly marking the date of some future event in a pathetic expression of longing — or worse, apprehension.

While I was agonizing over a pencil smudge, Phil was scorching his eyebrows in an attempt to ignite and adjust the pilot on the water heater. He finally succeeded, with a whoosh that agitated the windows and singed his pompadour as neatly as if he’d paid twenty-five bucks for a flame cut. Abashed, I took charge of dinner. While we waited for the piéeGce de réeAsistance — hot water — I opened three cans of beer, an institutional-sized bucket of Malloy’s Red Hot Texas Chili, and a loaf of white bread. Exhausted, we sprawled in front of the stove, baking like pots in a kiln, the mud crusting and peeling from us in stringy lumps while we sipped warm beer and mopped up cold chili.

Then we turned to the bathroom. There was a sink, a bathtub, a toilet (which, like the facilities on railway coaches, simply opened on the ground below; but whereas the railroad apparatus worked on the principle of fecal dissemination, ours relied on gravity and the slope of the ravine). The tub looked as if it had last been used to disinfect lepers, the porcelain pus-yellow and ringed with the strata of ancient immersions. It was a color that reminded me of the urinals at the old Penn Station, filth beyond redemption. I brought the Coleman lantern closer, and we examined the calcium-flecked fixtures, the husks of desiccated insects, the network of cracks that veined the inner surface of the tub like the map of a river delta. We stood there, as hushed as if we were gazing on the ruins of Lepcis Magna, until Gesh broke the silence. “Me first,” he said.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I protested. “Let’s at least draw lots or something.”

“I did most of the pushing out there,” Gesh said, but without much conviction. He looked like one of those New Guinea shamans who make masks of dried mud, his head big as a pumpkin, each strand of hair braided with dirt.

“Doesn’t matter.” Phil’s tone was crisp, businesslike. He produced a box of wooden matches, shook out two with sober-faced gravity, halved one and turned his back. Then he swung round, the three matchsticks protruding from the plane of his clenched fist like pins in a pincushion, and presented his hand first to Gesh, then to me.

Phil got the long one. “Flip you for seconds,” Gesh said, the coin already gleaming feebly in the dull glow of the lantern. “Tails,” I said, and lost.

Phil ran the water till it went cold. Then he shrugged out of his clothes, flung them in a silty heap beneath the sink — where they would undergo a gradual petrifaction as the weeks dragged by — and eased into the tub, moaning like a man in the throes of the consummate orgasm.

We watched from the doorway. “Five minutes,” I shouted, checking my Benrus.

By the time my turn came round, the water was tepid, and the color and texture of the Mississippi in flood. No matter. This was real dirt I was covered with — stinking, fermenting, wild-woods dirt — and there would be no peace, no sweet surcease from care, until I got it off me. Besides, I reflected as I lowered myself into the soup, as last man to bathe I could linger as long as I liked.

I didn’t. The water went cold almost immediately and the tap water was colder still. I lathered up, rinsed off, patted myself with a wet towel and made for the back bedroom, the ominous calendar and my damp sleeping bag. I was beat, every joint rubbed raw. Rain lashed at the roof, tiny feet scratched in the corners. I slept like a zombie.

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 50 °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

Chapter 2

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.”

We siphoned gas from the Toyota and added a pint to the inch or two of pale liquid we discovered in the engine’s reservoir. I took my turn at the pull. Nothing. We removed the spark plug and cleaned it. We checked the belts and wires and laid our hands against the cold metal casing like faith healers. Still nothing. Gesh fiddled with the carburetor in a way that indicated he didn’t know what he was doing. Phil looked over his shoulder. I’ve never been mechanically inclined myself.

We knocked off at noon, gulped reheated coffee and swallowed Velveeta sandwiches like pills, and then went out to put up the three-strand barbed-wire fence that would keep cattle and deer out of the growing areas. As soon as we left the house, the drizzle gave way to a deluge — plastic rain-colored sheets hammered into the ground, no sky above, buckling rivulets below. My nose was running. I felt as if I hadn’t been warm — or dry — in a month. “Okay,” Phil said, bending over a roll of wire, “you grab one end, I’ll get the other.”

Stringing barbed wire involves the use of a come-along, an insidious forged-steel device that operates on the leverage principle. You bind the thing to a sturdy tree trunk, crank the wire till it’s tight enough to strum, and then affix said wire to a post or tree by means of a U-clip. It is nasty, back-breaking work. And what made it even nastier was the terrain we found ourselves confronting.

When you’re growing a contraband crop you can’t just step out the front door, plow up a field and sow seeds as if you were raising corn, pumpkins and squash. No, you’ve got to be discreet. And with discretion in mind, Dowst had suggested we plant in widely separated patches — in the midst of existing stands of vegetation — as a means of subverting aerial detection. During the dry months, he’d explained, our plants would be the only viridescent vegetation for miles, and if concentrated, they would stand out like oases in a desert. Unfortunately, the only planting area he’d selected and laid out at this point happened to be located on a hillside with a slope comparable to that of Mauna Loa. We negotiated this hillside throughout the afternoon, shredding our hands, stumbling, lurching, falling, haphazardly stapling the wire to saplings and clumps of poison oak, cursing Vogelsang, cursing Dowst, cursing ourselves. It was dark when we quit.

Gesh did the cooking. He tended his two frying pans and the big pot of steaming water on the back burner with the scrupulosity of the cuisinier at La Bourgogne. In one pan, he fried eggs; in the other, pork chops. The pot of water was eventually converted, through the miracle of modern science and the chemical wizardry of General Foods, to a steaming, plethoric mass of mashed potatoes. At the moment of truth, when all three dishes had simultaneously reached the apex of culinary perfection, Gesh inverted both frying pans over the pot of instant mashed potatoes and beat the resulting melange to a froth with a spoon the size of a Ping-Pong paddle. “Soup’s on,” he said, jabbing a serving spoon into the midst of the glutinous mess — it stood erect — and setting the pot down on the table.

After dinner, we sipped cocktails (eight-ounce vodka gimlets, very dry) and stared at the wood stove. Phil hauled out his guitar and gave us a nasal rendition of “So Much Trouble” (My baby left me, my mule got lame,/Lost all my money in a poker game,/A windstorm came up just the other day,/Blew the house I lived in away), and then suggested we tell jokes to while away the time. We had to do something. It got dark at six and we had no television, no stereo, no radio, no lights even. I refilled the glasses while Phil told a hoary joke about a tractor, a bloodhound and a farmer’s daughter. The response was less than enthusiastic: neither Gesh nor I could even muster a grin. “Give me a break,” Phil said. He was seated cross-legged in front of the stove. His face, neck and hands were pocked with welts, as if he were suffering from chicken pox or scarlet fever. “It’s your turn, Felix,” he said, as I handed him his drink. “Tell us a joke.”

I said I didn’t know any.

“Gesh?” Phil said.

Gesh looked first at me, then at Phil. The Coleman lantern squatted on the table behind him, and it threw his shadow over the room, enormous, jagged, looming and receding as he leaned forward to light a cigarette or set his glass down. “What’s the closest you ever came to dying?” he said.

“Me?” Phil sipped at his drink, looking like a whiz kid who’s just been handed an intriguing equation. He produced a wad of toilet paper and blew his nose thoughtfully. “I don’t know — I guess it was the time I was working construction and nearly had a dump truck fall over on me. It was weird. I was too worried about looking stupid to be scared.” He pulled back the door of the stove and chucked in the wad of toilet paper: the room flared for an instant, then the iron door fell to and the shadows sprang back to reclaim the corners.

“I was nineteen, working for minimum wage and doing construction on this golf course in Westchester — they were adding a back nine to go with the nine they already had, and we were doing everything from digging trenches for the irrigation pipe to raking up stones and seeding the fairways. Anyway, the foreman, he’s this character right out of The Untouchables or something — Italian, heavy accent, square as a wooden block — and he wants volunteers to drive these three broken-down dump trucks he’s got, hauling dirt. There’s about thirty of us there — a couple of black guys in their late twenties, early thirties, and the rest a bunch of long-haired college kids. I’d never driven a truck in my life, but when the foreman says ’Who can drive this thing?’ I raise my hand. I thought it was funny that the older guys — the black guys — never looked up from their shovels, but shit, the way I saw it, it was a hell of a lot easier to cruise around in a truck than break your ass digging ditches.”

“I can relate to that,” I said, holding up my blistered hands.

“So I get in the truck. The pedals are the size of frying pans, two feet from the floor, the steering wheel’s like an extra-large pizza or something, there’s this dumping gear I’ve never seen before.” Phil looked up at me. “You remember that summer I worked at Loch Ledge.” I nodded.

“Anyway, six guys are coming with me. Two in the cab, the rest hanging on to the outside. We’re going to pick up a load of dirt and then bring it across the property and spread it. So I get down there at the base of this big hill and there’s another truck in front of me, idling, while this guy in a caterpillar — union worker, middle-aged, making two hundred bucks a day — fills up the truck. This is great, I’m thinking. Getting paid for just sitting here.

“Then it’s my turn. He fills me up so the dirt is mounded up over the roof of the truck, stones clanking off as I grind it into gear and head up this narrow dirt road, real steep, up the side of a cliff that overlooks this little stream they dammed up for a water hazard. Halfway up, in first gear, the bands start slipping. I’m going full out, foot to the floor, and the truck is standing still — overloaded, I guess. So I hit the brake. Nothing. The engine’s screaming, the truck is sliding backwards and I’m totally powerless.

“That’s when the other guys abandon ship. College kids, like me. Stupid, crater-faced, do-or-die types. They leap off the sides, open the door and jump. I don’t know what to do, don’t even think about it. All I know is the foreman’ll eat me for breakfast if I wreck the truck, so I just hang on, foot to the floor, bands slipping, the truck inching backwards. I was dead, from stupidity, from not knowing that I could die, from not even considering flinging open the door and jumping.”

Phil was grinning. “But I’m not dead — though I think I will be if we have to go through much more of the sort of bullshit we went through today.”

“So what happened?” Gesh asked.

“Oh. It was simple. The guy on the bulldozer saw what was happening, steamed up the hill like he was coming off the starting flag at Le Mans, caught me with the bucket and pushed the whole business right up the road and onto level ground. I was within about three feet and ten seconds of being crushed under Christ knows how many tons of dirt and I didn’t even really know it.”

Ice cubes rattled in our glasses (we’d been provident enough to bring up six bags of ice in a pair of plastic coolers). Wood hissed in the stove. We mulled over Phil’s story in silence for a moment before Gesh turned to me. “How about you, Felix?”

I laughed. “The closest I ever came?” I laughed again, remembering. “It’s short and sweet,” I said, “nothing like Phil’s. But it’s weird and mystical almost. Did I ever tell you about this, Phil?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It was when I was living in New York with Ronnie and we rented that summer place for two weeks — I think it was about a year after we got married. You remember the place, Phil.”

Phil took a long pull at his drink and made a face. “In Lake Peekskill, right?”

In Lake Peekskill. A bungalow that belonged to my Uncle Irv and that stank of cat shit and mold. We’d been living in the city and we had no money. Irv let us have the place cheap. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

“That’s the place,” I said. “You remember how it smelled?”

Phil nodded, Gesh leaned forward. I told the story.

There was sun the first couple of days. I set up a volleyball net, swam across the lake, charred meat on the outdoor grill. I was Mr. Country all of a sudden. Ronnie did crossword puzzles. Then the rain started. A low-pressure system that hovered over New Jersey like a judgment and gave us four solid days of thunderstorms. When the sun finally poked through again I was burning to get out — we were wasting our vacation. I asked Ronnie if she wanted to take a hike in the woods.

“The woods? Isn’t there enough woods right here to satisfy you?” We were hemmed in by maple, willow, white birch. Hummocks of unmowed grass fled from the wall of the house, ducked under a barbed-wire fence and flowed out into a field where cows were lowing. I shrugged my shoulders. What I wanted was deep woods, solitude, the pale clerestory light that filters through the trees and settles over you like an ancestral memory. Ronnie eased into a lawn chair with a tube of tanning butter, her prescription shades, a magazine and a radio. I told her I’d be back in a couple of hours.

It was August. Humid, the trees drowning in green. I drove to the state park and followed a rutted dirt road through a close dark tunnel of hardwood and pine. It was a one-lane road. There were no other cars. Eventually I reached a primitive bridge that might or might not have supported the weight of the car. Afraid to chance it, I backed off the road as far as I could and stepped out to have a look at the stream rushing under the bridge.

The stream was high and roiled, swollen with runoff from the previous days’ storms, hurling debris over its banks, slamming at the base of the bridge as if it would annihilate it. I don’t know what I was thinking of — I was a city dweller, and I’d never been out in the woods alone in my life. Perhaps it was some recollection of Boy Scout camp or the cabin my parents had rented when I was younger, or perhaps it was simply an instinctual need to experience nature in some primary, unsanitized way — at any rate, I decided to follow the stream into the green tangle that swallowed it up.

If I had vague stirrings of the excitement that must have infected a Hilary or a Cabeza de Vaca, they were quelled almost instantly — others had been here before me. With a vengeance. They’d guzzled beer, blasted shotguns, changed babies, gobbled tortilla chips and carved their names in tree trunks. As I went on, though, following a rough path that dodged in and out of the tumble of rocks bordering the streambed, the signs of civilization began to disappear. There was still the occasional Schlitz can or shell casing, but I began to get the impression that I’d penetrated more deeply into the forest than the average day-tripper, and I felt a swelling of pride. When I came across a natural pool fed by a steady plunging waterfall, I settled down on a rock and ate the Hershey bar I’d brought along, careful to fold up the wrapper and tuck it in my pocket.

The water gulped and hissed like a dozen Jacuzzis, birds whistled in the branches, sunlight broke through the treetops to fracture the surface of the pool. I felt at peace, in tune with things, I felt like Huck Finn, Nick Adams. There were no serpents in the forest, there was no poison ivy, nothing to bite or sting or discourage. Why hadn’t I done this more often? I thought, munching candy. This was great, this was exhilarating, this was nature.

It was at that moment that a thunderous, splintering crack sounded behind me and I was suddenly raked along the right side of my body and swept aside as if I were nothing, a dustball, a speck of dander; then there was a booming crash and an explosion of water that soaked me through. A tree had fallen. My arm was scraped raw, my clothes were wet, there was bark and sawdust in my hair, ants scrambling down the back of my neck. The base of the tree lay beside me, as big around as the Washington Monument; the far end of it was sunk into the pool at my feet.

I’d told the story before. It was at this point in the recitation that I looked up and held my audience’s eyes, the old loon with his hand on the wedding guest’s arm: “If I’d been sitting twelve inches to the right, I would have been crushed.”

Gesh whistled. “That’s some story.”

“CITY MAN HEARS TREE FALLING IN FOREST,” Phil said, quoting an imaginary headline and hooting into his gimlet.

My hand trembled as I lifted my drink from the box of canned beets that doubled as an end table. I always felt odd telling that story, no matter how I tried to make light of it. I hadn’t been crushed, I hadn’t contracted leukemia at fourteen or run my motorcycle into a fence. To remember it, to describe it, was to admit not only that I could have been crushed in any one of a thousand ways, but that inevitably I would be, as all of us would. It was a thing you didn’t think about. Maybe that’s why Gesh suggested it.

I stood abruptly and began to rifle through the bags of groceries that lined the crude kitchen counter and competed with garbage for space on the floor. Shaken, light-headed, filled with the soul-barer’s exhilarating sense of communion and absolution, I let my fingers do the thinking. Cold tin, cold aluminum. Shapes. The muffled clatter of air-tight cans. Finally I came up with a can of black olives. I borrowed Phil’s Swiss Army knife, serrated the lid and sucked back the oily dark essence of Greece — or rather the San Fernando Valley — and settled back down beside the stove.

Then it was Gesh’s turn.

He fingered the scar that split his eyebrow. “I got this in a car crash,” he said. “I was driving, shit-faced drunk. A red Triumph I borrowed from a girl I was going out with. Went through a stone wall at sixty and the thing burst into flame. Some stranger pulled me out. I was unconscious.”

He rolled up his shirt to expose a triad of short angry welts. “And this I got down in Mexico. Some shithead in a bus station said something to me in Spanish I didn’t like the sound of, so I hit him. He stabbed me three times.”

I said something weighty like “Holy shit.”

Gesh looked pleased. He liked to think of himself in heroic terms — biggest, toughest, smartest, strongest, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, eat the most Quaaludes and still stand up and wash the dishes. Raised in Echo Park and educated in abandoned clapboard houses and the alleys out back of Sunset Boulevard, he’d been through it all — gang fights, juvenile hall, doping, moping, expulsion from his high school honor society, and two years of the worst the UCLA classics department could dish out — and he never let you forget it. After a pause of suitable dramatic duration, he said, “But I’ve been closer than that, a lot closer.”

We leaned forward.

“It was the Sirens,” he said, “they lured me onto the rocks. One siren, anyway. Her name was Denise. Short, tight ass, skin like ice cream — like toasted-almond ice cream. I met her on the beach in Venice, summer before last. We were having a party and she was somebody’s cousin or sister or something, in a white two-piece that offered up her nipples like hors d’oeuvres. She walked up to me and traced the scars on my stomach with the tip of her finger. ’Where’d you get that?’ she says. ’Gall bladder?’ When I told her, her eyes went funny for a second, narrowing like little periods and then opening wide, green light, let’s go.

“We went. She took me home with her — she had money, a ground-floor apartment in Manhattan Beach with a little patio and cactuses that must have cost five hundred bucks apiece. Next day we went out to lunch. We went to the zoo, saw a band at the Whisky. Then two days later she called and asked me did I want to go out on her father’s sailboat. Sure, I said, why not?”

Phil said he’d been sailing exactly three times in his life, twice on lakes and once on Long Island Sound. All three times he’d ended up in the water.

Gesh lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “That’s about as much experience as I’d had, too, fooling around in lakes and coves in those little fourteen-foot jobs, Sunfish or whatever you call them. But this boat was big, thirty-five feet or so, bobbing in the water at Marina del Rey like a big white coffin. … I mean it had bunks and a galley with this little stove and refrigerator, Stolichnaya in the freezer, teakwood decks, the works. It was called The Christina Rossetti—after some poet her mother’d studied in college, Denise said.

“She said she knew what she was doing, but we had a lot of trouble just getting the sails up and making it out of the marina without hitting anything. But after that, with the whole wide blue sea out there, it was easy. The boat ran itself. Every once in a while the sail would come round and Denise’d tell me to haul on this line or that, but it was no big deal — it wasn’t like we were going anywhere or anything. Shit, I began to enjoy myself. The sun was flaring away, there was a nice breeze blowing, Denise looked edible in this black bikini. I mixed us some cocktails and slipped my hand in her pants. We did it right there, standing up, her holding onto the wheel, the boat rocking, seagulls flapping by. It was fantastic, like being on an island or something — nobody around for miles. There was no reason to put our suits back on.”

Gesh looked up at me. “Sounds great, huh Felix? Paradise on earth, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’ve got a feeling this is where it turns nasty.”

“Nasty? That doesn’t even come close, man — this was fucking horrifying. One minute I’m getting laid and sipping a martini, the next I’m in the water. What happens is the wind comes up all of a sudden while we’re lying there on the deck, stroking each other and getting hot to do it again. I’ve got a hard-on like a steel rod and I lift myself up to stick it in her when the boomline breaks and this fucking pole comes slamming around and catches me under the chin. Next thing I know I’m in the water — the ocean. Miles from shore. I can’t even fucking swim that good, and I’ll tell you”—he was holding my eyes—“snakes may be your thing, but mine is sharks. I’m scared shitless of them. I don’t even go in over my head at the beach because I’m afraid some saw-toothed monster is going to rip my legs off. Really, I don’t care how I go, just so long as I don’t wind up as shark shit.”

I watched as Gesh extracted rolling papers and an envelope of pot from the pocket of his dungaree jacket. He rolled a joint thin as a Tootsie Pop stick and passed it to me. I lit it, took a drag, and passed it back.

“So anyway, Denise jumps up and starts wringing her hands and screaming and whatnot, and then runs back to the wheel and tries to swing the boat around. Meanwhile, I’m churning up the waves like Mark Spitz — it’s amazing what you can do when you have to — and the boat is drifting away. Drifting? I mean it was flying, really moving out, sails humming and everything. I wasn’t in the water ten seconds and it was already fifty yards away. Then it was a hundred yards, two hundred, and then it was gone.

“Christ. I was in an absolute panic. For about the next ten minutes I swam for all I was worth, the chop of the waves crowding me in, gulping water, stopping every few seconds to kick myself up as high as I could and try and see something. Water, that’s all I saw. No land, no boat. Nothing. It was cold. There was salt in my eyes. It was then, completely by accident, that I blundered into a life preserver—The Christina Rossetti, it said in big red letters. I felt like I’d been saved, right then and there. I hooted for joy, heaved myself up on the thing and waved my arms. She’ll be back any minute, I thought, soon as she gets the goddamned boat under control. She’ll be back, she’s got to be.

“I was in the water for six hours. Shivering, praying, scared full of adrenaline. I kept making deals with the Fates, with God, Neptune, whoever, thinking I’d trade places with anybody, anywhere — lepers, untouchables, political prisoners, Idi Amin’s wives — anything, so long as I’d be alive. I remember I kept looking down to where my feet disappeared in the murk, feeling like they were separated from my body or something, sure that at any moment they’d be jerked out from under me. I thought about Jaws and Blue Water, White Death. Thought about the guy who got hit by a white shark off the Farallons and was dragged down about a hundred feet by the impact and said the happiest moment of his life was when he felt his leg give at the knee.”

The joint had gone dead in Gesh’s fingers. He was staring down at the floor and seeing waves, his face sober with the memory of it, nobody laughing now. I wondered why he was telling us this, what the point of the exercise was. At first I thought he’d been boasting, letting us know how tough he was, how hip and cynical and experienced with the ladies. But now, looking at the way his face had gone cold, I realized that wasn’t it at all.

Phil got up with a snap of his knees and fed a bundle of pine branches into the stove. There was a fierce crackling and an explosion of sparks as he slammed the door and eased back down on the blistered linoleum. “So come on,” he prodded, “don’t keep us in suspense — finish the story.”

I made some noises of encouragement and Gesh relit the joint.

“I spotted seven boats that day,” he said, shaking out the match, “and I shouted my lungs out, tried to throw the fucking life preserver up in the air — anything. But nobody saw me. That was the worst. You’d get your hopes up, thinking, I’m going to make it, I’m going to live, and you’d start paddling for the boat, screaming like a wounded rabbit, and they’d just coast right by as if you didn’t exist, as if you were dead already. Then the sun went down. If they couldn’t see me in the light of day, what chance was there they’d spot me in the dark? None, zip, zero. I began to cry — the first time I’d cried since I was a kid. There was a hole inside of me. I was shivering nonstop, like a machine about to break down. I was dead.

“Then, just after the moon rose, this gigantic cabin cruiser — fifty feet long at least — comes cutting across the waves straight for me. It was lit up like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime, they were having a party. I could see them, gray heads, cocktail glasses, two women in low-cut dresses. ’Help!’ I scream. ’Help!’ The engine was chugging away, waves slapping the bow: they couldn’t hear me. I fought my way toward the point where I thought the boat would pass and tried once more, screaming till my throat gave out. Then, like a miracle, like statues bleeding and the dead coming to life, one of the gray heads turned. ’Here!’ I shouted. One woman touched the other’s arm and pointed.”

Gesh’s voice had quavered. He sat in silence for a moment, running the tip of his tongue over his upper lip and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “They didn’t even have the radio on,” he said, waving his palm in frustration, “they didn’t even know I was out there. Luck is all it was. Blind luck. I came on board naked, racked with shivers, two miles off Palos Verdes in the most shark-infested waters on the southern coast. One of the men aboard is a doctor. He tells me I’m suffering from hypothermia and makes me get into this down jacket, wraps me in blankets and gives me hot pea soup. Which I hate.

“When we get back, Denise is waiting on the pier along with a bunch of news reporters and guys in Coast Guard uniform. She’s barefoot, still in her bathing suit, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. I don’t know what came over me — I should have been filled with joy, right, glad to be alive and all that — but when I saw her there looking like the distraught heroine I just thought, You stupid bitch. You worthless piece of shit. Somebody was snapping pictures, flashbulbs bursting, she was running down the planks with her arms outstretched like it was the end of a movie or something, and I just couldn’t take it. I gave her a stiff arm like Earl Campbell — caught her right in the breastbone — and sent her sprawling over the edge of the dock, ten feet down, into the blackness. There was a scream and a splash, and suddenly everybody cleared a path for me.”

That was it. Finis. Gesh sat there, big and rumpled, something like a smile of satisfaction tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t believe it,” Phil said. “You really pushed her in?”

Gesh looked as self-righteous as a fundamentalist at a book burning. He drained his glass and flashed us a grin. “Bet your ass I did.”

Phil started it, with a snicker that gave way to a bray. Then I joined in, counterpoint, and finally Gesh, three-part harmony. We were drunk. We were alive. And for the second time that day, we were laughing. We laughed impetuously, immoderately, irreverently, wiping tears from our eyes. Late into the night.

Chapter 3

“All right. You won’t actually need to know about this for another two weeks or so, but you may as well get an idea right now.” Dowst leaned on the haft of his shovel, patting at his face with a red bandanna. Behind him, banks of mist obscured a sick pale sun, light spread across the horizon like putty. At his feet, a hole. Raw yellow earth, gouged out like a boil or canker sore. “You want to go down about two, two and a half feet, and make it wide around as a garbage can lid.” Suddenly he was grunting or wheezing in the oddest way, like a horse with a progressive lung disease. It took me a minute before I realized what it was: he was laughing. “Or a”—he wheezed again—“or a big cut-glass punchbowl.”

It was a joke. Phil, Gesh and I glanced at one another. Ha-ha.

We were standing over the hole, our breath steaming in the cold damp air, watching Dowst like Botany 101 students on a field trip. It was seven a.m. Gesh was wearing a black turtleneck maculated with grease stains (the result of a breakfast mishap), Phil was hunched in the carapace of a paint-spattered K-Mart sweatshirt, and I was sporting one of the flannel shirts I’d bought for the country, now torn and dirtied beyond recognition. Dowst was wearing eighty-dollar hiking boots, pressed jeans and the yellow rain slicker he’d had on the night I met him. “This,” he said finally, “is the model hole. Once you get the fences up you’re going to have to dig two thousand of them.”

Gesh had a cold. He dredged the mucus from his throat and spat noisily. “While you’re sitting on your ass in Sausalito, right?”

“No, no, no, no, no — I’ll be right here the next three or four days at least, working side by side with you. We’ve got to get those fences up and start the seedlings before we get too far behind schedule.”

“And Vogelsang?”

Dowst tucked the bandanna in his pocket and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “He said he’d be up tomorrow.”

“Shit.” Gesh focused on a fist-sized stone and hammered it against the side of the house with a vicious swipe of his boot. “That’s what he said a week and a half ago.”

Dowst had showed up at dusk the previous evening — eight days after the appointed time. For a week and a half we’d been on our own, isolated, bewildered, putting in twelve-hour days with the come-along and then collapsing on our soiled mattresses at night. Once the initial hillside had been fenced (we called it the Khyber Pass in tribute to its vertiginous goat-walks and sheer declivities), we erected a greenhouse to specifications Dowst had given us in Bolinas. It was a joy compared to fencing. I took charge, relieved to be doing something I was familiar with, and we threw up the framework in an afternoon. Then we nailed Visquine — clear sheets of plastic — over the waterlogged studs and painted the whole thing green, khaki and dirt brown: army camouflage. “I feel like we’re going to war,” Phil said over the hiss of his spray can. His right hand and the sleeve of the jacket from which it protruded were a slick uniform jungle green, owing to a sudden wind shift. Gesh stood beside him, his arm rotating in a great whirling arc, spewing paint like smoke. His jaw was set, he was squinting against the fading light. “Damn straight,” he grunted.

Then we began to get itchy. Neither Dowst nor Vogelsang had showed up and we had no further instructions. And yet Dowst had repeatedly impressed upon us the vital necessity of keeping on schedule. The plants had to attain their optimum growth by September 22, when the photoperiod began to decrease. Once the daily quotient of sunlight was superseded by a greater period of darkness, the plants automatically began to bud — it was built into their genes — and that was that. The later you got your seedlings into the ground, the smaller your plants would be when the autumnal equinox rolled around — and the smaller the plants, the smaller the harvest. You didn’t have to be a botanist to appreciate how all this smallness would relate to net profit.

“So what do we do?” I asked. We were inside now, sipping at the evening’s first cocktail. We’d just driven the final nail into the greenhouse, the moon was up and the birds were crouched in the trees, grumbling like revolutionaries. “Just sit around?”

Gesh was in the kitchen, rattling pans and slamming drawers. “Mr. Yale is fucking up on us already,” he said, swinging round and slapping a blackened pot of ravioli on the table. “How could we ever be so stupid as to trust somebody with a name like Boyd Dowst?”

We’d put in a tough day in damp, forty-degree weather. The fire was warm, the smell of food distracted us, canned ravioli, boiled potatoes and pale yellow wax beans had appeared on our plates. There was coffee, orange juice and something that resembled a foot-square brownie. Outside, the hiss of wind and a spatter of rain. We ate in silence, our eyes gone soft with the first chemical rush of hunger gratified, facial muscles swelling and contracting, saliva flowing, throats clenching and stomachs revolving in mindless subjection to the alimentary imperative: chew, swallow, digest. I listened to the scrape of utensils on the tin plates, glanced at our beards, our tattered clothes, the ramshackle roof that sagged over us, and thought how apt Phil’s military metaphor had been — we were like irregulars, some cadre of the People’s Army holding the line in a remote outpost, guerrillas taking refuge in the mountains. Of course the metaphor had its limits — we were capitalist guerrillas, after all.

“We could use a day off,” Phil said after a while. “We can’t do anything without Dowst and Vogelsang. I mean, what do we know about plants anyway? Christ, I never even had a wandering Jew.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said.

“No? What are we supposed to do then — fence in the whole three hundred and ninety acres? I say we take tomorrow off and just lay up and rest — or maybe go into town, see what kind of nightlife Willits has to offer.”

Gesh was shaking his head. “Uh-uh, Felix is right. Look, I’m not up here for my health — I’m going to bust my ass, tear my hair out, do everything I fucking can to make sure I see that hundred and sixty-six thousand come November — and I say we pick out another growing area on our own.”

Next morning we took the come-along and went looking.

It was a good move psychologically. We were riding the crest of accomplishment, the dreariness and hardship of the first week behind us, one area already fenced and the greenhouse erected, and now, when we had every excuse to sit back and wait for instructions, we were seizing the initiative. Here we were, men of action, hard, tough, ready for anything, off to wrest a million and a half dollars from the earth. But where to begin? There was an awful lot of territory out there: trees uncountable, rocks, slopes, sheer deadly drops, gaping gulleys, hardpan flats that mocked pick or shovel, thickets of thorn and manzanita as close and sharp as teeth. “What we need,” I said, lacing my sneakers, “is something hidden, level and not too far from the house.” We were milling around the front yard, belching softly over breakfast. “Good luck,” Phil said.

The property sloped sharply toward the dirt road that linked us (however tenuously) with the outside world, and then dropped off beyond it to the south and east. To the north was Sapers’s house, inconveniently located at the extremity of his property, no more than two hundred yards across the ravine from ours. (We couldn’t believe it — the two places combined must have been close to a thousand acres, and yet the houses were within shouting distance. Wagon-train mentality, Phil called it, his voice saturated with disgust.) To the west, the mountain we were situated on rose another two hundred vertical feet before petering out in a smooth bald crown of rock. Since we wanted southern exposure — that much we knew at least — we started down a crude ancillary road that looped away from our driveway and wound round the southern slope like a waistband.

You didn’t have to be Natty Bumppo to see that the road had been in disuse for some time. Branches had begun to close over it, saplings sprouted in the hollows dug by ancient wheels, clumps of poison oak made forays into the shoulders. There was evidence of animal life, too, most notably mounds of excrement flecked with seeds and bits of nutshell. I stopped at one point to tie my shoelace, and when I caught up with my co-workers they were bent over a glistening coil of feces that had been deposited smack in the center of the road. “Dog shit,” Gesh announced.

“There aren’t any dogs up here,” Phil said. “I bet it’s raccoon shit.”

“What about coyotes?”

“Whatever it is, it looks pretty big,” I said.

Gesh was racking his brain, mentally thumbing through the pages of some old battered Fieldbook and Guide to the Mammals of the Pacific Northwest. “Bear shit?”

We glanced around us as if an entire zoo were crouched in the bushes, eyes blazing, ears cocked, great pink tongues lapping at paws and hind ends. Then Phil straightened up, shrugged, and looked off down the road: the wonders of nature had an intense but short-lived appeal. We moved on.

Surprisingly, the road began to level out farther on down the mountain, until finally we came upon a strip that showed evidence of recent use. The faint impress of tire tracks was visible beneath a grid of weed, and here and there a bush had been lopped or a tree limb severed. Moments later we came across a garbage-strewn path that intersected the road at a forty-five-degree angle and then plunged into a thicket as dense as something you’d expect to find in the Great Dismal Swamp. “What do you make of this?” I said, hesitating.

Gesh grunted. The path was well worn, the bushes clipped back. “Jones,” he said.

Jones. Enlightenment came like a blow to the back of the head. My pulse rate accelerated. Undifferentiated fears assailed me like bats exploding from a cave.

Phil looked perplexed, as if we’d been talking in code. “Who?”

“That dipshit farmer, remember? Somebody was up here last year, he said, somebody that was up to no good. Somebody named Jones.”

“Or Smith,” I added, but Gesh was already lumbering through the undergrowth, striding along like a Bunyan, and I hurried to keep up. I don’t know what I expected to find — half-eaten human carcasses dangling from the trees, a cache of automatic weapons or an angel-dust factory — but I should have guessed. “Wait up,”

Phil called. Weeds slapped at my face, a branch snagged the sleeve of my shirt. I focused on Gesh’s back, birds hissed in the trees, something darted off through the bushes, and suddenly we were standing at the edge of a sunlit clearing between walls of oak and laurel. I took it all in at a glance: the gray splintered tree stumps, the chicken-wire fencing, the sunken rims of the holes. Strips of corrugated aluminum had been driven into the ground at the base of the fence, as if at the border of some suburban zucchini patch, and hundreds of twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups littered the area, crushed underfoot, caught up in the roots of bushes, while deflated plastic bags advertised a Polk Street party supply house. There was garden hose, too, great sun-bleached coils of it, and crumpled half-empty sacks of fertilizer from which jagged clumps of weed had begun to sprout.

Gesh stood in the midst of this desolation, hands on hips. Phil and I were spouting expletives and taking the name of God in vain. We were like children exposed to the ugly underbelly of Fantasyland, the dirt and grease and grinding gears beneath the pristine forest floor. “Pot!” I shouted, surprised at my own emotion. “The son of a bitch was growing pot up here and Vogelsang never said a word about it.”

It was true, it was incontrovertible. If the Leakeys had problems interpreting the archaeological record at Olduvai, this was a snap — it couldn’t have been clearer had Jones left a diary with photographs. He’d used the Styrofoam cups to sprout his seedlings, and he’d dug the holes — as we would — to create a controlled environment for his maturing plants. But what went wrong? Or had it gone wrong? Maybe Jones was in Rio at that very moment, parading around in a Nixon mask and doing cocaine till his septum dissolved. I had a fleeting vision of palm trees, the girl from Ipanema, the mask, the cocaine and a water glass of dark Jamaican rum, but it was almost immediately supplanted by a vivid recollection of the Eldorado County Jail and the look of unreasoning hatred on Officer Jerpbak’s face.

“Hey, what’s this?” Phil said, fishing a flat wooden object from the weeds. I saw rust, a spring and a coil of steel wire. It looked like a rat trap.

“Looks like a rat trap,” Gesh said. I studied the ground. There must have been fifty of them in plain sight. I remembered the rats or squirrels I’d seen the first day — big brown things the size of footballs. There was a connection here, a nasty connection. But I wasn’t ready to make it.

For the next ten minutes or so we poked around Jones’s growing area (Smith, Jones: was anybody really named Smith or Jones?), uncovering rat traps, checking the chicken wire fences, gazing up at the sky in an effort to gauge the area’s vulnerability to aerial detection. Then we continued along the road and discovered that it gradually wound back on itself and joined our driveway just below Sapers’s house. On the way back I said I didn’t like the fact that someone had tried to farm the place before us. Phil didn’t like it either. “I wish I knew whether Jones was lying on a beach in the Bahamas or out on bail,” he said. Gesh spat in the dirt. He was climbing the hill with his long loping strides, breathing hard. “At least we know where to put the fence up,” he said.

Three nights later, after we’d refenced and cleared Jones’s plot (we dubbed it “Jonestown” by way of honoring our unknown predecessor and out of a perverse sense of humor that laughs in the face of its own defeat), we heard the sound of a well-tuned engine straining up the hill. All three of us were outside in the gathering dusk as Dowst’s sky-blue van lurched into the front yard and skidded to a halt. The first thing Dowst said was “Sorry I’m late,” as if he were overdue at a cocktail party. We said nothing. “I had to finish up this article on the walking-stick cholla for The Cactus and Succulent Journal, and I just got buried in my notes.” He shrugged. “Well, listen: I hope you can appreciate my position — I had to deliver on time and there were no two ways about it. I’m sorry.”

He looked like a page out of an L. L. Bean catalogue: fisherman’s sweater, duck hunter’s vest, skeet shooter’s cap. We regarded him with unremitting hatred. He’d been writing articles and we’d been stringing wire.

“So,” he said, clapping his hands and rubbing the palms together as if they were wet, “I see you’ve got the greenhouse up.”

Our heads turned like beads on a string. The greenhouse sat in the corner of the yard like the centerpiece in an exhibition of avant-garde sculpture, its camouflage colors disguising it about as effectively as the brick-oven red of my Toyota. “Yeah,” Gesh said finally, turning to Dowst, “no thanks to you.”

That night we sat around the stove, smoking the pot Dowst had brought Us, examining the Skippy jars full of seeds that would make us our fortune, and listening to Dowst’s assurances that everything was all right and that the few days we’d lost really wouldn’t matter in the long run. The resentment we’d felt when he first stepped from the van had begun to wane, and Phil broke the ice socially by offering him some of the corn chowder he’d been boiling for the past three days. Dowst feigned a grateful smile and said he’d already eaten. I told him he could sleep on the couch, but he said he’d just as soon sleep in the van — which he’d equipped, incidentally, like a pimpmobile, with cherrywood paneling and shag carpet. “Okay,” I said, “have it your way.”

In the morning we found ourselves in the front yard, lined up like refugees and licking egg yolk from the corners of our mouths, while Dowst plied his shovel in an exemplary and instructive way. The air was dank. A crow jeered from the rooftop. We listened to the hiss and scrape of the shovel, the sudden sharp clamor of metal and stone. We watched Dowst’s flailing elbows, his sure foot, we counted the seams in his designer jeans. And then, when he stood back, wiping the sweat from his brow with a red bandanna, we edged forward, silent, curious, awed and disgruntled, to contemplate the model hole.

Chapter 4

I was against it. Gesh was for it. Phil wavered. But when we came within sight of Shirelle’s Bum Steer, the bed of the pickup loaded to the gunwales with groceries, twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups, half-gallon bottles of vodka, seam-split sacks of worm castings and steer manure, three rolls of chicken wire and a battery-powered Japanese tape player Gesh had picked up at a yard sale, Phil braked, downshifted and spun the wheel, and we rumbled into the parking lot like Okies on parade, lurching to a halt beneath the sorry bumper-blasted oak that presided over the place in long-suffering martyrdom.

There were three other cars in the lot: two mud-caked Chevy pickups and a Plymouth Duster with bad springs. A dog that looked like a cross between a malamute and a hyena regarded us steadily from the bed of the nearer pickup. “Just one,” Phil said, holding up a finger and draining a can of Coors in a single motion.

“Or two,” Gesh grinned.

“Okay,” I said, gulping down my beer. “But remember what Dowst said.”

“Fuck Dowst.”

“No, really — we can’t be too careful.”

“Loose lips sink ships,” Phil said, swinging out the driver’s door.

“Right on,” Gesh shouted, drumming at my shoulder blades as I heaved open the door and flung myself from the cab.

For a moment we just stood there in the glutinous muck of the parking lot, the hyena-dog’s yellow eyes locked on us, the tavern door as forbidding as the gates of Gehenna. We were feeling guilty. Dowst had laid down the law, ex cathedra — we were to pick up the groceries and supplies and head directly home. No stopping. Not at diners, bars, burger stands — not even at the post office. It was absolutely essential that we keep a low profile, talk to no one, remain anonymous and invisible. You strike up a friendly conversation — with the checkout girl, the man at the Exxon station, the old lady peddling stamps at the post office — and you’re dead. Dowst assured us, with Puritan solemnity, that the locals could spot a dope farmer a mile off.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Phil said.

I studied the dog, the scarred tree, the massive weathered windowless slab of redwood that barred the entrance to Shirelle’s inner sanctum. The Duster, listing to the right, sported a bumper sticker that proclaimed: I’M MORAL. It looked like rain. “Yeah, I guess we shouldn’t,” I said.

“Shit,” Gesh said. Nobody moved.

In that instant the decision was taken out of our hands. The door suddenly burst open and a woman emerged, an aluminum beer keg cradled in her arms like the decapitated head of a lover. She was in her early forties, dressed in black spandex pants, a lacy Victorian blouse and a pair of aniline-orange spike heels, with ankle straps. I registered bosom, flank, false eyelashes and a shade of mascara that was meant to coordinate with the shoes. There was a moment of hesitation as she locked eyes with us; then she flashed us a smile, tossed the empty keg down outside the door and invited us in. “Goddamn,” she said, and it was almost a bark, “you guys going to stand out here all afternoon or come on in and join us?”

Inside it was dark as a closet, the windows grimed over, a few feeble yellow bulbs glowing here and there. Two men sat at the bar, hunched over beers; three others slouched at a table in the back, their faces ghoulish in the blue light of the jukebox. All five were wearing straw hats worked into nasty, rapierlike peaks, work shirts, Levi’s and boots. They shared a look compounded of shock, indignation and irascibility in equal portions, as if we were the last thing they expected to encounter in the shadowy depths of Shirelle’s, and the first thing they’d like to stamp the life out of, followed by rattlesnakes, rats and weasels, in that order.

Shirelle ducked behind the bar, wiped her hands on a dirty towel and gave us a pert, expectant look. We were milling around, searching our pockets, shuffling our feet. The jukebox thundered with the strains of hillbilly-trucker music: Don’t let your cowboys grow up to be babies and Tears in my beers, can’t keep a bead up over you. Gesh ordered shots of rye and beer chasers. We sat. Gallon jars of pickled eggs confronted us, a faded souvenir pennant from the Seattle World’s Fair, dusty bottles of Bols créeGme de menthe, Rock & Rye and persimmon liqueur. The bar was smooth as a salt lick with generations of abrasion, the soft sure polish of sleeves and elbows. We threw down our shots like mean hombres and then took economical little sips of beer.

Shirelle leaned back against the cash register and lit a cigarette. “Haven’t seen you guys before,” she said. “Just passing through?”

“No,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gesh said.

“We’re heading over to Covelo,” Phil said, working a country twang into his voice.

“Covelo?” Covelo was the end of the road, a hamlet that gave on to Indian reservation, national forest, mountain. No one but game wardens and liquor salesmen went there.

Phil leaned across the bar, confidential. “We’ve got a load of smallpox-infested blankets for the Indians.”

Shirelle stared at him for a minute, blank as an oil drum, and then she let out a whoop of laughter so sharp and sudden it made me spill my beer. No one else cracked a smile. The faces by the jukebox drew together, beaked, craggy, a glimmer of blue-black Indian hair. Shirelle laughed like a woman who’s not responsible for her actions, breaking off to hack into a fist glittering with painted nails. She laughed till tears dissolved her makeup. Moles appeared out of nowhere, lines tore at her eyes. “Hey,” she gasped finally, “let me buy you another one, you funny guy,” and she reached out to pinch Phil’s cheek.

An hour later I reached for my wallet and spilled a pocketful of change on the floor. I waved at it vaguely, and then slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar. “Another round,” I said. Shirelle and Phil were dancing, their groins locked like machine parts. Gesh was shooting pool with the Indians in back, and I was engaged in conversation with George Pete Turner at the bar. I was also leering shamelessly at Shirelle’s daughter, who’d been summoned from the house to help the other customers while her mother helped Phil.

The daughter’s name was Savoy — surname Skaggs, as George Pete informed me. Delbert Skaggs had left Shirelle ten years back to run off to Eureka with the Cudahy twins, Natalie and Norma. Turner was squinting at me through a haze of Tareyton smoke, his voice low and confidential. There was more to the saga, but I wasn’t listening. No. I was down from the hills, back from exile, and I was ogling Savoy’s butt with all the mendicant passion of a Charlie Chaplin, out at the elbows, pressing his nose to a plate-glass window rife with cream puffs and napoleons. The girl couldn’t have been eighteen, let alone twenty-one. But she looked good. Very good. Golden arms, a low-cut sweater top, violet eyes — one just slightly but noticeably smaller than the other. She caught me staring, and I asked her where she’d got her locket from.

“This?” She fished the gold heart from her cleavage and stared down at it as if she’d never seen it before. Then she giggled, showing small even teeth and an expanse of healthy pink gum. “Eugene gave it to me before he went into the army.” George Pete Turner’s whiskery face hung at my shoulder like a salami in a delicatessen. He was nodding in confirmation. “He’s stationed in Germany,” she said. “Wiesbaden.” She pronounced it wheeze.

I didn’t know what to say. I watched her as she carefully set the three sizzling beers down on coasters and lined up the shot glasses, cocked her wrist and expertly topped them off. “Nice,” I said.

“Did I tell you that Ted Turner in Georgia — the tee-vee magnet — he’s my second cousin?” George Pete’s voice had a nagging edge to it, each word a desperate raking claw fighting for a toehold. He was talking to the side of my face. I ignored him.

Savoy leaned over the bar and arranged the shot glasses in a neat little circle before me, the locket dangling enticingly from her throat. I could smell her perfume. Behind me I heard the click of the pool balls and a voice I recognized in a moment of epiphany as Phil’s, singing along with the jukebox. “Satin sheets to lie on,” he crooned, every bit as passionate and downhome as George Jones or Merle Haggard, “Satin pillows to cry on.” I don’t know what came over me, but I reached for the locket.

“Hey,” Savoy said, pulling back in slow motion, chin lifting to expose the unbroken white line of her throat.

My hand traveled with her, the button of gold pinched between my thumb and forefinger, the palm of my hand coming into inevitable contact with her breast as she straightened up. I was leaning over the bar. My hand was on her breast and I had her by the locket. “Nice,” I said again, stupidly. “Very nice.” She was grinning. George Pete’s eyes were like raging bulls, and I felt suddenly, with all the clarity of Cassandra, that something unpleasant was about to happen.

I was right.

The door swung back with a shriek and Lloyd Sapers lurched into the barroom, so drunk his feet failed him and he slammed off the doorjamb like an errant cueball. Our eyes met. I dropped locket and breast, looked away, looked back again. In that instant of looking away, a shape had obliterated the doorway, hulking shoulders, belly, head, hands like catcher’s mitts, feet of iron: Marlon.

Gesh and the Indians had paused over their pool game — elimination — Gesh arrested in the act of lining up a shot, cuestick bisecting the bridge of his fingers, angles mentally cut. He looked up at the door with a quizzical expression, as if he’d just turned a corner and found himself in the middle of a parade. Phil, entirely oblivious, had worked Shirelle up against the jukebox and was grinding away at her like an escaped sex offender.

“Well, Jesus H. Christ and all the saints and martyrs,” Sapers roared. “If it ain’t the teetotalers.”

At that moment, George Pete Turner — he was, I later learned, the prospective father-in-law, sire to the absent doughboy and guardian of the family jewels — hit me in the left ear and knocked me from the bar stool. I made a four-point landing, on hands and knees, in a puddle of beer. Lloyd Sapers laughed. I’d been blind-sided, sucker-punched, humiliated. Crouched there, poised between mercy and grief, I could hear the fearful grinding of the earth as it slipped round its axis. And then the shadow of Sapers’s son fell over me and I knew I was doomed.

When I came out of my cringe I saw that George Pete Turner was being restrained by his drinking companion, a toothless beardy old sot who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, and that Marlon, who was merely blinking curiously at me, had the face of a fleshy Boy Scout. Savoy had emitted a short truncated gasp and then faded to the far corner of the bar, Phil was glancing over his shoulder in surprise, Shirelle’s eyes were abandoning the smokiness of passion and hardening for action, and Gesh was advancing on the bar, gripping his cuestick like a Louisville Slugger. The Indians were ice statues, drinks locked in their hands like glacial excrescences, and Johnny Cash, his basso rattling the glasses on the shelves, was letting me know that he, too, walked the line. And then, as quickly as it had erupted, it was over.

Marlon, it turned out, was no threat at all. He had a mental age of nine, and was inclined toward violence only in private, isolated circumstances — if someone inadvertently got between him and a plate of food, for instance. He was massive. A barely contained spillage of viscid flesh, titanic, crushing, monumental. But puerile. Dangerous only in potentio. He stepped over me, feet like showshoes, bellied up to the bar and asked, in the pinched, whining tones of the preadolescent, for a Coke.

“Hey-hey,” Sapers said, clucking away in some orphic backwoods code, as he staggered forward to help me to my feet. Shirelle was standing beside George Pete, who looked abashed. He apologized, and shook hands with me, but wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Guess I’ve had one too many,” he mumbled, zipping his lumberjacket, shoving through the door and vanishing into the night.

Gesh eased his cuestick into the wall rack, buttoned his torn trench coat and said, “Let’s hit it, Felix. Come on.” He had a hand on my elbow. Sapers had cringed and backed off a step when Gesh advanced on us, then turned his head and shouted something about the weather to George Pete’s toothless comrade, who was no more than two feet away from him. My ear throbbed.

I felt vague and disoriented, as if my blood had somehow evaporated. Phil, his face solemn, gathered my money from the bar and held out my coat.

“Bye, honey,” Shirelle said as we made for the door.

I looked back over my shoulder at the figures stationed round the room, Shirelle lushly replicated in her daughter, the slouching, twitching Sapers, George Pete’s wizened cohort, the Indians gliding in brilliant liquid motion over the pool table, and Marlon, mountainous, his big pale glowing visage hanging over the scene like a planetary orb. No one looked particularly sympathetic.

“Could I please have another Coke?” Marlon piped.

The door was swinging to. I heard Sapers’s shout, indistinct, competing with the jukebox and the clatter of glasses — I couldn’t be sure but I thought he was hollering about crops, now’s the time to get them crops into the ground, or something like that. Boom, the door slammed. Faintly, from within, I could still hear him: “Drunks!” he shouted. “Hypocrites!”

Then it was quiet. But for the hiss of the rain.

“Oh, Christ,” Phil said.

It was dark. The rain fell in cataracts. We ran for the pickup, sloshing through ankle-deep puddles, everything a blur. We should have walked. There was something in our urgency, in the frantic quickening pace of our legs, that triggered a corresponding impulse in the all-but-forgotten hyena-dog that had stared so implacably at us as we entered the bar, and had waited patiently through the decline of day and the onset of the steady chilling rain for just such an opportunity as this. I was halfway to the truck when a silent lunging form streaked from the shadows and fastened itself to my pant leg with a predatory snarl. Tripped up, I pitched forward into the darkness with a splash, aware of mud, water, the exploratory grip of jaws. And then I was face down in the rank wet dirt, rolling and tumbling like a man afire, flinging up first one arm and then the other as the dog raged over me in an allegro furioso of snapping teeth and stuttering growls. “Rimmer!” a voice shouted close by. George Pete’s voice. “You get out of that now!” And the dog was gone.

A mere twenty seconds had been extracted from my life. The violent conjunction of bodies, the interrupted flight, the accelerated heartbeat, the mud, the torn clothing, the raising of welts and breaking of skin — the assault was over before it began. I pushed myself up and limped to the truck, my sleeves shredded and pants flapping. Phil and Gesh were huddled inside. The engine roared, wipers clapped. “What the hell happened to you?” Phil said as I pulled myself into the cab like a flood victim flinging himself over the gunwales of the rescue boat. What could I say? Talk was cheap. I shrugged my shoulders.

Back at the summer camp, I took one look at Dowst’s censorious face and told him to go fuck himself. Then I dabbed my wounds with alcohol and slogged out to help my co-workers evacuate ruptured sacks of groceries in the grass and haul dissolving bags of manure to the storage shed. It was no fun. At one point Phil turned to me, rain in our faces, cans of beets, niblet corn and garden-fresh peas at our feet, the sorry scraps of superstrength, double-bottomed bags in our hands. “Okay, so we screwed up,” he said. “I’ll be the first to admit it.” The flashlight picked out a soggy loaf of French bread at my feet. Rain sifted through the trees. “We screwed up,” Phil repeated, “but at least we had a good time.”

Chapter 5

Oiled, glistening, wicked, they lay on the table in grim tableau, in the sort of menacing still life you see in the newspapers under the headline ARSENAL SEIZED. Guns. Three of them. A.22, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and the most lethal-looking thing I’d seen outside of the reptile house at the San Francisco Zoo, a.357 magnum pistol.

“You can’t be too careful,” Vogelsang said, grinning his diseased grin. He was wearing a one-piece khaki jumpsuit, boot to throat, the kind of thing favored by astronauts or kiddies toddling off to bed. The gloves, hood and gauze face mask were neatly arranged on the crate beside him. Aorta, in a sheeny metallic jacket, was watching me as I fingered the weapons.

It was lunchtime. Soup was boiling over on the stove, the windows were steamed up. Our guests had just stepped through the door, weapons bristling, commandos on a raid. Vogelsang greeted me by name, nodded at Phil and Gesh, then spread the firearms out on the table. Phil hovered over the blistered wooden counter, masticating a bologna sandwich with the intensity of a beaver felling trees, and Gesh, sweat-stained and filthy, was propped up on the couch with a beer. Dowst was in the green house, where he’d been all morning, planting seeds in twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups.

“So how’s the moon launch going?” I said.

Vogelsang gave me a blank look, then grinned and tugged at the front of his jumpsuit. “You mean this?” he said. “Poison oak. I get it like the bubonic plague and leprosy wrapped in one.”

I hefted the shotgun judiciously, sighted down the barrel like a sharpshooter. Actually, I’d only fired a gun once in my life. Eleven years old, a Boy Scout for two months (after which I quit: too much marching and knot-tying), I lay on my belly in the dirt and clicked off round after round at a bull’s-eye target. I remembered the firecracker smell, the snap of the report, the quick thin puff of smoke. The scoutmaster leaned over me, his face stubbled with whiskers, and breathed terse commands in my ear. “Sight,” he whispered. “A hair to the left. Squeeze.”

The gun was surprisingly heavy, the trigger light: death instantaneous and irrevocable. “Do we really need this sort of thing?” I said, trying to sound casual. “I mean, a pistol that could blind an elephant — isn’t that a bit excessive?”

Gesh grunted. I couldn’t tell whether it was a grunt of disparagement or agreement. I glanced at him. He was sipping beer, eyes squinted over the tight high cheekbones. I knew the look: he was sorting things out, ordering the priority of his grievances before opening up on Vogelsang.

Vogelsang laughed. He’d led patrols in Vietnam, shot people from cover, garroted underfed Asians in secrecy and silence. “Look, Felix, you’re going to have a million and a half dollars’ worth of pot out there. Not only do you have to worry about the law, but you’ve always got the possibility that some hunter or one of these dirtbaggers will blunder across it. What would you do in their place? You know, out in the woods, poking around — maybe even looking for an illegal operation? I know what I’d do. I’d take it, no questions asked.”

If at some point I’d glamorized the outlaw life, the romance of the scam and all the rest, if at some point I’d pictured myself a latter-day Capone or Dillinger or Bugsy Malone, I suddenly saw the stark and nasty underside of the whole operation. Guns. I’d never imagined I would have to defend myself with a gun. Quit, a voice whispered in my ear. Get out now.

Vogelsang was studying my face, grinning still. He was enjoying this. “Come on, Felix,” he said. “Really, it’s no big deal.” He paused to produce the ever-present vial of breath neutralizer, working it rapidly between his palms as if he were starting a friction fire. “Chances are maybe one in a hundred that any-body’ll come around. But don’t you want some insurance if they do?”

What could I say? Vogelsang was pooh-poohing me, Aorta regarded me appraisingly, Phil and Gesh seemed to accept the presence of firearms as casually as they accepted the pork cheeks in bologna or the nitrites in beer. I was a man, a dope farmer, an outlaw and a flimflammer. The gun was as much a tool of my trade as the come-along or spade, and I would just have to get used to it. I shrugged.

Meanwhile, splayed out on the couch, his eyes like coiled snakes, Gesh had apparently sorted out his various complaints and decided to make his presence known. Suddenly he crushed the empty beer can in one callused fist and sent it rocketing across the room like a three-and-two fastball; it hit the kitchen wall with a cowbell clank, and rebounded neatly into an overflowing bag of garbage. Four heads turned toward him. “Listen, Herb,” he said, a peremptory edge to his voice, “I think we got a few things to discuss, brother, and guns is the least of them.”

Here we go, I thought. I could feel the dollars slipping from my pocket, the seedlings wilting, the clash of personality like an early frost, an ill wind, like blight and scale and rot. Vogelsang cocked his head and leaned forward, his lips tight with a thin bemused smile. He could have been a headmaster bending an ear to an ingenuous and sadly misinformed pupil.

“First of all,” Gesh said, his voice strangled with the effort to control it, “I don’t like this business of you sniffing wine corks down at Vanessi’s and la-de-dahing around Bolinas while we’re busting our asses up here with no electricity and broken-down equipment, in the fucking rain, freezing our balls off, and then the quote expert shows up a week and a half late, and you, you come waltzing in the door like this was a costume ball at the Lions’ Club or something. …”

Phil was licking mustard from his fingers, both irises locked in alert alignment, while Aorta, unconcerned, a creature of another species, insentient, slow-blooded, ducked through the doorway with sacks of groceries and laid them on the counter like the offerings they were. Gesh’s voice nagged on, expressing deep and insupportable disaffection with everything, from lack of direction and equipment to the leaky roof and the holes in his boots and underwear. I could see the lines being drawn, the sides forming up: slaves and overseers, coolies and satraps, workers and bosses.

Yes, you know when I begin to farm,

My old boss be didn’t want to furnish me,

He bad one mule name’ Jack, an’ one name’ Trigger,

All the money for him an’ none for the nigger.

So could Vogelsang. He was nervous, hyperkinetic, scratching round the room like a dog looking for a place to squat. Pursing his lips, he did his best to look thoughtful and conciliatory — contrite, even. When Gesh finally wound down, Vogelsang parried with sympathy, promises, a waved fistful of cash — he actually extracted a roll of bills from his pocket and waved it like a flag of truce — and a pep talk worthy of Winston Churchill in his finest hour. He planned to stay for the next six days—at least, he said. He’d brought groceries, supplies, equipment, booze, cash, pot, a Monopoly board, cheap paperbacks, a four-wheel-drive vehicle. “And Boyd,” he said, summing up, delivering the clincher, “Boyd’s planning to stay on without a break until all the seedlings are in the ground and the growing areas enclosed.”

“Seedlings, shit,” Gesh growled, but I could see that he was mollified. In the space of three minutes Vogelsang had managed to reassure us that we hadn’t been neglected, that he’d foreseen everything and was prepared to lay out the capital to meet all our needs, and that, most important, our project was not doomed to failure, not at all — no, this was just the beginning. Everything was all right. We were going to make it. We were going to beat the system. We were going to be rich.

And then, seeing his opening, Vogelsang took the offensive. “I might remind you, friend,” he said, his words diced as if by a dozen quick knife-strokes, “that I’m the one who’s putting up the capital for this little venture, and that I’m under no obligation to be up here at all. In fact, once things get rolling, you’re going to see less and less of me.”

“Less?” Gesh lurched out of the chair. He stopped three feet short of Vogelsang, jabbing his index finger at him. “You tell me: what’s less than nothing?”

The smile was frozen to Vogelsang’s face. For an instant something flickered in his eyes, something like emotion, but he killed it.

And then Phil was stepping between them like a rodeo clown, shuffling his feet and ducking his shoulders. His mouth was full and we couldn’t catch what he was saying at first, but he was bowing and sweeping his arm in a grand comic gesture. Then he swallowed, hefted the blackened pot from the stove and set it down on the table. “Soup’s on,” he said.

There were two and a half gallons of soup. Unidentifiable chunks of meat or vegetable matter bobbed in a greasy slick that reeked of black pepper and garlic. It was food, that’s all that mattered. We crowded round the caldron like the half-starved bricklayers of Ivan Denisovich, ravenous after a long morning of physical labor. Hands grabbed for bread, spoons, bowls. Vogelsang, I assumed, would decline to join us.

I was wrong. He dipped his bowl into the pot like a true son of the proletariat, squatted down before the stove, and broke bread with us. Perhaps he didn’t have the faintest idea of how people related to one another, perhaps the quotidian range of human emotion was an enigma to him, but there was no denying this: he knew how to take charge of the situation.

After lunch, Vogelsang tinkered with the generator for ten minutes or so and then fired it up with a sudden blatting roar that obliterated the solitude of the hills and froze my heart like a block of ice. “Shut it off,” I screamed, bursting from the house, where the lightbulbs had begun to glow dimly. He glanced up at me, then leaned over and shorted the spark plug with a plastic-grip screwdriver. “Works fine,” he said.

“But the noise — they’ll hear it for miles. It’s like Pearl Harbor or something.” (I could picture the town sheriff spilling his coffee every time we started the thing up. “What the sufferin’ Jesus is that?” he asks the basset-faced deputy. “It’s them city boys,” the deputy says, “up on the old Gayeff place. Lloyd Sapers says they’re growin’ corn or somethin’ out the side of a mountain. What you make of that, Ormand?”)

Vogelsang stood. “Yes, well — you’ve got a problem there. Maybe you could use it sparingly, huh?”

Then he was off with Dowst for a tour of the plantation — an antebellum cotton farmer overseeing the darkies’ efforts — while we labored with come-along and fence-pounder at growing area number three, a grassy slope we’d dubbed “Julie Andrews’s Meadow” because its blues and greens looked like something done in CinemaScope. That night there were six of us for dinner, and as we sat beneath the brownly glowing light-bulbs and suffered the ratchetting shriek of the generator, we found we had some rethinking to do and some hard questions to lay bare.

“I can appreciate how hard you fellows have been working,” Vogelsang said, “and I think that second growing area you’ve picked is ideal, but some of the fencing you’ve done is … well, I don’t think you’ve got the idea.”

We were seated on the floor, gathered in a semicircle round the wood stove. Dowst, Vogelsang, Aorta, me, Phil, Gesh. Dowst and Vogelsang were eating reconstituted black mushroom soup and freeze-dried paella out of plastic bowls from Dowst’s backpacking kit. The rest of us — Aorta included — were eating blood-raw steaks, canned beans and French bread, courtesy of Vogelsang. A jug of Cribari red occupied the place of honor in the center of the floor.

“What do you mean?” Phil said.

“Well, listen. I don’t think we have to string barbed wire around the growing areas.” I began to protest — we’d nearly killed ourselves over that wire — but Vogelsang anticipated me. “Now hear me out — this’ll save you a lot of work. The way I see it, and Boyd agrees with me, the only place we need barbed wire is along the border of Lloyd Sapers’s property.”

“Now he tells us,” Phil said.

Gesh filled a twelve-ounce Styrofoam cup with wine and glared at Dowst and Vogelsang as if they’d just nailed his mother to a tree. Phil wiped his plate mournfully, while I toyed with a crust of bread, overcome with the sort of plummeting despair you feel when you’re driving coast to coast and suddenly realize, in the dead of night, that you’ve been going in the wrong direction for the past three hours, the oil light is flashing, you’re nearly out of gas, and your dog is not curled comfortably asleep in the back seat as you’d supposed, but was abandoned along the strip of crapped-over grass at the last truck stop. I watched as Dowst sucked beige droplets of soup from his mustache. His shirt was pressed and his hands were as white and unblemished as bars of soap. Aorta chewed steak.

“It’s the cows the barbed wire will keep out. And the cows are ranging all over Sapers’s place, and ours, too. Right, Boyd?”

Dowst nodded, dabbing at his mustache with a paper towel. “We saw three of them on the property today. And you know what that means — the cows get lost and then the cowboys come looking for them.”

“Right,” Vogelsang said, the paella going cold in his lap, “that’s what I mean. We fence the property line — just on Sapers’s side — and then we avoid that sort of, ah, confrontation.”

“And the growing areas?” I said.

“Deer fencing.” I watched Vogelsang raise a forkful of rice to his lips, then put it down again. “Clear the area, fence for deer, dig the holes, lay the irrigation pipe and watch the plants grow.”

“One deer,” Dowst said, holding up a single finger for emphasis, “could eat twenty plants in a night. And the barbed wire does nothing for them — they just jump right over it.”

Gesh suddenly got to his feet, stalked across the room and out the door. Left ajar, the door swung lazily back on its hinges, and the room filled with the clatter of the generator. “What’s with him?” Dowst said. I shrugged. The noise was excruciating. I was about to get up and slam the door when the lights failed and the roar abruptly died — with a choking, throttled cough and an explosion of backfire. One thousand, two thousand, three — I counted off the seconds as we sat in absolute, intergalactic darkness, the silence drawn over us like a cloak. Then a light appeared, wavering, and Gesh stepped back into the room with a Coleman lantern.

“Too much racket,” he murmured. “Makes me nervous.”

Vogelsang was nodding in affirmation. He’d repaired the generator as a concession to our needs, but I knew he was against it. Perhaps — and the thought was like the first trickle of gravel that precipitates a landslide — perhaps he’d perforated the muffler or something to make it louder still, his way of subtly demonstrating that comfort wasn’t worth the price of exposure. Certainly the thing could be heard from the main road, and who knew what sort of visitors it might attract — people like Sapers, or worse. (Sapers’s place glowed with cheap, silent, efficient wattage, incidentally. The PG&E line climbed the mountain as far as his house, and as I would one day discover, he’d paid a tidy sum for the privilege. But that’s another story.) “I think you’re right,” Vogelsang said, and I suddenly realized it was the first time he and Gesh had agreed on anything.

Gesh set the lantern on the table, stepped between Vogelsang and Dowst, eased himself down beside Phil and reached for his plate. Dowst murmured something to Vogelsang about the temperature in the greenhouse, Gesh addressed himself to a mound of pinto beans, and Aorta turned to me and asked, as if she’d been considering the question all evening, “You into music?”

“Music?” I echoed, as if I’d never heard the term before. “Yeah. Sure. Of course. Who isn’t?”

“Ever hear of the Nostrils?”

I’d already failed. I shook my head sadly.

“I sing with them.”

“Oh, yeah? Really?” This was the first time she’d initiated a conversation, the first time she’d said anything in my hearing other than yes, no, hello, goodbye. I was interested. I was also, after three celibate weeks on the mountain, consumed with lust. I studied the slope of her breast, the swell of her calf, the neat red laces of her suede hiking boots, and tried to picture her engaged in deviant acts. Outside, in the greenhouse, seeds were sprouting.

She shifted her buttocks, bent to her plate and took a forkful of meat. “Yeah,” she said, white teeth, black lips, chewing. “I think you’d like us.” She was about to say more when Gesh cleared his throat and said, “So, Herb, why don’t you tell us about Jones.”

Silence.

Vogelsang looked uncomfortable. He looked besieged, hunted, weary, looked like a man who could think of better ways to spend his time — pressing pasta and stuffing weasels, for instance. I wondered how long he could keep his equanimity. “Who?” he said.

“You know: Jones. Dude that was up here last year, growing pot?” Gesh never stopped pushing, but he was right. If Vogelsang was hiding something, we were entitled to know about it.

“I don’t know why you didn’t tell us,” I said. “It seems pretty significant, doesn’t it, to know that somebody tried to farm the place before us?”

“No big deal,” Dowst said, cutting in. “We knew he’d been busted—”

“Busted?” There was a chorus of cries.

“—and we figured he’d probably been doing some farming up here, but we never found any evidence of it.”

“Yeah, and I’ll bet you looked real hard, too,” Gesh said.

“Busted?” I repeated, incredulous.

“On the highway, Felix,” Vogelsang said, in control again, “miles from here. The way I heard it, he was sitting in a line of cars — they were doing roadwork and only one lane was open — and he tossed a joint to this long-haired ditchdigger. Five miles up the road the CHP nailed him for possession. Stupid, that’s all.”

“But he had a trailer up here,” I said. “You must have known he wasn’t up here for his health.”

“Yes, well. As Boyd said, we assumed he’d been doing a little cultivating, but that really didn’t affect us. He had an address someplace in North Beach. I figure he got a little paranoid after the bust, harvested early and cleared out — if he harvested at all.”

Dowst smoothed the collar of his shirt and then set the plastic bowl down beside the plastic utensils. He could have been on a camping trip to commemorate his tenth-year Andover reunion. “So there’s nothing to connect Jones with the place — it’s irrelevant. Jones is irrelevant.”

“Not if El Ranchero Grande next door knows about him,” Phil countered. “ ’Up to no good’ is what he said.”

“Yeah.” I was getting incensed, strung-out, suspicious. “And if Sapers thinks Jones was up to no good, what do you suppose he thinks we’re doing? Writing? With a come-along?”

Vogelsang shrugged. He looked tired.

Jail cells, I thought, dawn raid, yellow toilet, hardened criminals, buggery. I was picturing the three of us, shackled together, jackets pulled up over our heads, half a dozen Jerpbaks prodding us with nightsticks, when Gesh suddenly hammered the floor with his fist. He was shouting. “Come on, Vogelsang, you son of a bitch — you put Jones up to it, didn’t you? Huh? Just like us.”

Aorta’s eyes glowed like neon. Dowst swiped at his hair. I could hear crickets or locusts or something going at it outside as if they were laying down the backing track for a horror film. With exaggerated calm, Vogelsang leaned forward to pour himself a glass of wine. He took a long sip, and then held Gesh’s eyes. “I’ll show you the deed to the property,” he said. “I bought the place in February. From a fellow named Strozier — Frederick C. W. Strozier.” Vogelsang shifted his gaze now, expanding his field of vision to include Phil and me. “Go ask him. Maybe Jones was working for him”—giving us the Charlie Manson stare—“just as you, my friends, are working for me.”

Gesh muttered an obscenity, his voice so thick it could have been dubbed. I wondered if he’d been rat-holing Quaaludes.

“You’re in or you’re out,” Vogelsang said, hard now, no patience left, the bargain-driver and market-manipulator. “Either trust me or pack it in.”

I knew at that moment I should take him up on it — pack it in, get out, get clear. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. We’d just got there, the seeds were burgeoning in the dark moist earth of the greenhouse, Rio awaited. “Okay,” I said, answering for all of us. “Okay. But no more secrets.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “What about the calendar?”

No reaction.

“You know what I mean, Vogelsang, come on. The calendar, the one you dug up in the shed and hung in the bedroom.” I felt something rising in my throat — gas, maybe. My heart had begun to hammer. “The calendar,” I repeated. “The joke.”

He looked up at me as if he hadn’t heard, looked up as if he were deaf and dumb. His face was blank, no glimmer of comprehension in his eyes. He could have been aphasic, could have been a tourist who had no grasp of English. Worse: he could have been innocent.

Like the Savior at Golgotha, Vogelsang stayed three days. On the morning of the third day he arose and assembled us for instruction in the use and maintenance of firearms. We stood out front of the house confronting a series of makeshift targets — bottles, cans, Mason jars, a grid of two-by-fours faced with plywood and clumsily inscribed with sagging concentric circles. This last, mounted on stilts and angling backward like an artist’s easel, explained the persistent hammering that had jolted me awake at the hour of the wolf. I breathed on my hands and then thrust them into my pockets. It was foggy and cold, dew beading our vehicles and the mounds of rusted machine parts that lay scattered in the high grass like the remnants of a forgotten civilization. Clumps of mist clung to the trees like balls of hair in the bristles of a brush. The model hole, a few yards to our left, was water-filled and rimmed with fingers of ice.

I was contemplating our new vehicle — an open Jeep of ancient vintage with big heavy-grid tires that had unfortunately gone bald — when Dowst emerged from his van, clean-shaven and alert. There was a notebook clenched under his arm and a row of pens clipped to his pocket — he could have been back at Yale, loping off to attend an early lecture on bryophytes. He slogged his way through the weeds, sidestepped the hole and joined us on the improvised firing line. “Going to take notes?” I said. Phil giggled. Dowst gave me an odd look, held out the notebook and flipped through the pages for me. I saw maps of the property, pages of calculations and formulas, notes on fertilizers, soils, mean temperatures and annual rainfall. Humbled, I ducked my head and spat in the grass.

Then the door slammed behind me and I turned to watch as Aorta picked her way toward us. “Good morning,” she croaked, her voice ragged and raw. The cropped hair lay flat against the crown of her head; she was makeup-less and huddled in her silver jacket like a runaway. I rubbed my palms together and gave her a weak smile.

“Anything happens,” Vogelsang was saying, “and your obvious choice is the shotgun.” His eyes were hard, glacial, veins stood out in his neck. I was thinking of drill instructors, Fort Hood, recruits dying in basic training — eighteen years old and their hearts give out — when Vogelsang handed me the gun.

I didn’t know what to do. I was prepared to fire the thing — in fact, in a childish sort of way I was looking forward to it. But not first. No. First I wanted to watch Vogelsang bring it to his shoulder, sight down the barrel, squeeze off a round or two; I wanted to hear the roar, see the target totter, gauge the force of the recoil. Life was full of surprises, most of them unpleasant. Why rush into things?

Vogelsang was lecturing, his words coming at me as if from a great distance: “Ithaca. Twelve-gauge. Pump. Double-ought shot.” I held the gun stiffly, like an artificial limb. Flesh soup, I thought. Ground round. Then Vogelsang took my arm and indicated a target set apart from the rest — a pillow perched atop a peeling three-legged end table, no more than thirty feet away. He had painted a Kilroy face on it, eyes, nose, slashes for eyebrows, and a big grinning circus mouth. “Go ahead, Felix,” he said. “Let it rip.”

I felt silly. “That?”

“Go ahead.”

I put the gun to my shoulder and squinted down the barrel. The sight was a flap of metal, an M, and I peered through the cleft of it with one eye shut, lining up first the table, and then the big sloppy mouth of my bitterest enemy, the crop-stealer, the desperado, the rip-off artist. It was like taking a photograph. Dying color. I concentrated on an image of Robin Hood splitting arrows, held my breath, and pinned the trigger.

There was a roar. The table splintered, the pillow exploded in a puff of feathers: now you see it, now you don’t. I was startled — not only by the volume of the blast but by the violence of the recoil, which slammed at my collarbone like a karate chop — so startled I nearly dropped the gun. Through the ringing in my ears I could hear Vogelsang’s laughter. I suppose it was funny, my juggling the thing as if it were hot, my confusion, my fear. The ineluctable modality of the risible. “Well shot, Felix,” he said between gasps. “You see my point?”

I saw his point. Where table and pillow had formerly stood, there were only feathers, sifting down like a meteorological aberration. There was no reason even to aim the thing. Just blast away. Destruction. Devastation. Annihilation. I saw his point. But I didn’t like the way in which he’d made it. Not especially. So I turned round, hands trembling, and pumped another shell into the chamber — Vogelsang’s face went cold; beyond him I could see Gesh, Phil, Aorta, Dowst, smiles freezing as if the wind had suddenly shifted and brought with it a whiff of something foul — and then swung leisurely on the other targets.

“Hey!” Vogelsang waved his arms. “No!”

I wasn’t listening: I was aiming. Fifty feet. What was that — a cider jug? Yes. I could read the label. Apple Time. Unsweetened. “Felix!”

Cold steel, hot blast: the gun answered for me. And then again, and again.

Chapter 6

In all, including Phil and me, there were seven customers in the caféeA when the CHP cruiser swung off 101 and nosed into the parking lot. We were sitting at a window booth. Relaxing. Eating. Enjoying a supply run and a two-hour break from the routine of the summer camp. In the booth across from us, a brittle-haired woman in her mid-fifties carped at her daughter, while the daughter’s daughter, a two-year-old, kicked at the tabletop. The other denizens of the place — aside from the withered old crone in the checked mini-skirt who performed the multiple functions of chef, waitress and cashier — were two old men, in identical overalls and sun-bleached shirts, who sat at opposite ends of the counter, stolidly blowing into cups of coffee.

Nearly four weeks had passed since we’d last seen Vogelsang, and during that time we’d made determined progress, managing to enclose eight of twelve growing areas, fence the property line between our place and Sapers’s, dig twelve hundred holes, and reverentially transplant every last one of the healthy seedlings Dowst had sprouted. Unfortunately, less than twenty percent of the seeds had proven viable, and we wound up with only about fifteen hundred seedlings, a third of which fell prey to some mysterious enervating force in the greenhouse — fungus, leafhoppers, gamma rays, locusts, who could say? Dowst had assured us that he would come up with additional seeds to replace those that had failed. Of course, we would have to scale down our original estimate a bit, but still, even though the second crop would get into the ground a bit late, we should nevertheless come close to the full thousand pounds we’d projected. He was an optimist, Dowst. We looked at it philosophically. So we harvested nine hundred pounds instead of a thousand. Big deal. We’d be rich anyway.

I watched as the cruiser slunk across the lot, weaving in and out of potholes with a muscular grace that suggested a carnivore at ease — a panther, belly full, gliding along the path to its lair. Behind the windshield, which alternately reflected the clouds and darkened to transparency, I could make out the rigid forms of the officers themselves, twin pairs of mirror shades, a riot gun framed menacingly in the rear window. I looked away. And found that I was clutching a laminated menu: Two Eggs Any Style, Super Chili Beef Burger, Corn Dog — Try It! The waitress hovered over us with pencil and pad, and Phil, his voice saturated with ennui, was ordering. “The special,” he said. “That’s the stuffed cabbage with chili, right? And it comes with a side of coleslaw?”

The waitress nodded her ravaged head. “That’s right, honey.” She must have been seventy, thin, with a sunken chest and flat feet. Her hair was dyed moonlit brown, and it played girlishly across her cheek as she bent forward.

“I’ll take the Super Chili Beef Burger, too,” Phil said. “On the side. And another glass of milk, please.”

I ordered tuna on rye and a bowl of soup. Violins, converging on the maudlin strains of yet another country hit, whined from hidden speakers. Clouds expanded and contracted along the backbone of the sky. A fly batted at the window.

Then the door swung open behind me, footsteps scuffed across the floor, and the grid of seats heaved as a pair of oversized hominids settled into the booth at my back. I stole a glance out the window and saw that the cruiser was empty. “I’m telling you, you just can’t operate that fast,” a voice snapped in my ear before descending to an urgent rasping whisper. A second voice, also whispering, interrupted to hiss a reply. The back of my neck began to itch.

I reached for my coffee cup, found that it was empty, and signaled for the waitress. She looked up alertly, slid the Pyrex pot from the stove and started down the aisle — only to continue past as if she hadn’t seen me. She halted opposite the newly occupied booth at my back. “Can I get you boys some coffee?” she said. There was a pause in the disputation as both voices broke off to breathe “Please,” and then the rasping continued, covered momentarily by the splash and trickle of hot liquid. Phil reached across the table to nudge me, then indicated a point over my right shoulder and broke into a grin. “You see who just joined us?” he whispered.

I scanned the front page of the local paper, trying to ignore him. FUNDS CUT FOR RODENT CONTROL, I READ. HARRIET SEARS HONORED BY FATIMAS OF THE FEZ. DROUGHT IN NAMIBIA. And then, with a shock that built in my chest like the thump of a boxer’s speed bag, I came across the following:

ALL IN A (FIRST) DAY’S WORK

Officers of the CHP detained two Bay Area men early this morning when a routine traffic stop turned up nearly 3 kilograms of marijuana seeds and a small quantity of cocaine. Esig “Bud” Jones, 29, of San Francisco, and Aurelio Ayala, 26, of Daly City, were apprehended near Pt. Cabrillo on the Coast Highway. A spokesman for the Highway Patrol speculated that the seeds may have been intended for local cultivation in the highly lucrative “sinsemilla” marijuana trade that many feel has become one of the county’s biggest cash crops. Both men are awaiting arraignment in the county jail. Bail has not yet been set.

This is where the story ends. But it had its beginnings in the Ukiah substation yesterday evening when patrolman John Jerpbak reported for his first day of duty with the Ukiah division. Officer Jerpbak, a native of Willits who many will remember as a star halfback for the Willits Wolverines, had requested the transfer from his post in Lake Tahoe because, in his words, “I wanted to do my part in fighting this thing right here where my friends and family (Cont. Page 2)

My fingers were trembling. We were thirty-five miles from the ocean, and yet the surf was roaring in my ears. Phil leaned across the table and gestured toward the young mother: “You know, she’s not half bad.” I didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. I scanned the room like an impala checking the high grass for movement, the presence at my back swelling to nightmare proportions, and then turned the page.

There he was. Jerpbak. Clipped hair, cleft chin, eyes like arrows in flight. The story went on for two columns. I read about Jerpbak’s intrepidity in identifying and apprehending the suspects, I read about Jerpbak’s father, who’d sold insurance in Willits for thirty years, about his sister, his mother, his wife (the former Jeannie Jordan). And finally, the conclusion of the piece, familiar, congratulatory, an editorial backslap: “Welcome home, John.”

I ate tuna fish, but I didn’t taste it — I could have been chewing cardboard smeared with mayonnaise. My stomach contracted, acid rose in my throat. I looked up to see the waitress flirting with one of the old men at the counter — leaning into him like a dance instructor — while his counterpart stared dolefully into his coffee cup. Phil waved a monstrous, chili-dribbling burger in one hand, and a fork in the other. He was relating the plot of the science-fiction trilogy he’d begun two nights ago. I wanted to leave. Split, vanish, dissolve. Toss my money on the table, hunch down in my jacket and slink out the door.

“So Bors Borka, he’s the hero, finds himself on this planet where instead of only two sexes, they have five, all of which are necessary — all together — for an orgasm.” Phil took a bite of his burger, delicately lapping the extruded chili from between his fingers in the process. “There’s this penislike thing, the omphallus, that sticks out of this lake made of protoplasm, and it branches into three stalks. Then there’s this viridian creature sort of like a female, only instead of a vagina—”

“Phil,” I said, pressing both hands to my temples. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What’s the matter?”

I tucked the newspaper under my arm. Strings and oboes tugged at the chords of “Jailhouse Rock,” rain began to natter at the window, the old man at the counter slipped his hand up the waitress’s dress. “I’ve got a headache.”

Phil gave me a look of shock and dismay, as if I’d just suggested he share his food with everyone in the restaurant and then mail the leftovers to the Underfed Orphans Society. He took a quick bite of his Super Chili Beef Burger and a forkful of stuffed cabbage. “Christ,” he muttered, digging for another hurried mouthful. “You sure?”

The booth trembled as one of the patrolmen shifted in his seat. I nodded at Phil, then glanced up nervously and found myself staring into the young mother’s eyes. They were black, those eyes, soft and ripe as pitted olives. But I didn’t want olives, I wanted escape, seclusion, anonymity. I looked away in confusion, focusing on the Campbell’s Soup display and making a show of moving my lips as I read the labels: Chunky Mediterranean Vegetable, Turkey with Avocado, Plantain Broth. “All right,” Phil said, frowning. “All right — just let me finish what’s on my plate. I can take the burger with me.”

I pushed away my half-eaten sandwich and motioned for the waitress. She was poised over the second old man now, refilling his cup while he stared morosely into the knot of his hands. “The check,” I pantomimed. She ignored me. Jerpbak, I thought, the name howling in my ears. This was bad karma, malicious fate, the beginning and the end. I waved my arm. “Check, please,” I mouthed, fighting for restraint. Behind me, the rasping continued unabated, officers of the law engaged in private business, their flesh and mine wedded by a thin slab of plywood and Naugahyde. Someone coughed. And then, as if a hot wire had been applied to my temple, a nasty certainty leapt through my brain: Jerpbak was sitting behind me. Jerpbak himself. Of course. Who else?

Suddenly I was on my feet. Jerpbak, Jerpbak, Jerpbak: the name beat with my pulse. It all became clear in that instant — he’d tracked me down, spider and fly. He was a Heat, a Holmes, a Javert. He’d seen the guilt on me like a dye, like the thief’s tattoo, and he’d known in that moment what I was doing in Tahoe. Yes, and now he was waiting, that’s all, waiting till the plants were grown and the buds mature, biding his time till he could swoop down on us when it would hurt most. Phil looked up at me, a smear of chili at the corner of his mouth. “I’m, I’m …”I stammered, digging a five from my pocket and flinging it down on the table. Then I took a deep breath, steeling myself. At the count of three I was going to swing round, lower my head and stride out the door.

One Jerpbak, two Jerpbak, three: I pivoted and found myself locking eyes with a scowling cop in his late forties who looked as if he’d devoted his life to the invention of instruments of torture. There was no trace of sympathy or decency in his face, but I felt like embracing him, buying him a cigar, stuffing twenties in his pocket — he might have been an inveterate suspect-beater and civil-rights abuser for all I knew, but he wasn’t Jerpbak. The realization so elated me that I lurched forward and tripped over his slick black-booted foot. As I tumbled past him, fighting for balance and yelping an apology over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the second cop, the one whose back had for the last ten minutes been so alarmingly contiguous to mine. A glimpse of reflecting shades, cleft chin, clipped and parted hair. That was enough. I slammed into the cigarette machine, tore open the door and flung myself at the cleansing, quickening rain.

A moment later the door eased open and Phil joined me on the front steps. He asked if I was all right. I told him I just needed a little air, that’s all. We started for the pickup in silence, raindrops slanting down like so many straight pins. I hardly noticed. All that mattered was that they were watching us (I knew they were, as certainly as I knew that forests are immovable and men born of women), observing the way we lifted our feet and hunched our shoulders, noting the make of the truck and the license plate number, idly fingering their handcuffs. Police surveillance, I thought. Undercover operations. Tapes, photographs, body hairs. Suddenly I saw myself at the window of the cabin, opening up on them with the shotgun, stopping bullets with my teeth, vanishing in a puff of smoke. I slipped the keys into Phil’s hand. “What’s this?” he said. “You don’t want to drive?”

“No, I don’t feel up to it,” I said, climbing into the passenger’s seat. The pickup was loaded with plastic pipe in twenty-foot lengths, with four fifty-five-gallon drums and a gasoline-powered water pump. I was trying my best to look like a tourist or hitchhiker, but I knew it was hopeless. We might as well have painted the truck Day-Glo orange with vermilion pinstriping and the legend DR. FEELGOOD’S FARMS. We were dope farmers — that was as readily apparent to any fool on the street as our species identification — dope farmers stockpiling equipment for their irrigation system. I hunched down in the seat.

“So,” Phil said, grinding the ignition, “I didn’t tell you the best part yet.” I was mute, cataleptic. He went on anyway. “Well, Borka ducks into this cave to escape a column of Termagants from the planet Terma, when he miraculously comes upon four of the sexes trying to get it on — but of course they’re missing the fifth link, which just happens to be this armless man-sized thing with a little penis and a prehensile tail. So here comes the space hero, fascinated, watching these four weird creatures go at it, heaving and rocking in frustration …”

The truck jerked back, drawing away from the cafée A like a missile from the launching pad. I fought the impulse to look up. Fought it, and lost. As Phil swung around and shifted gears, I snatched a glance out of the corner of my eye. I saw the cruiser with its gold badge of justice, the cracked cinder blocks of the front porch, the little box of the cafée A with its picture windows and advertisements for corn dogs and thick shakes. Light fell from the windows in slabs. I could see nothing. And then, just a flash: dark forms, bereft of animation, as shadowy and insubstantial as the figures in a dream.

Chapter 7

That night, after we’d unloaded the truck and put dinner on, I spread the Jerpbak article out on the kitchen table and motioned for Gesh to have a look. Gesh had spent the afternoon digging holes, and he was stretched out on the couch like a corpse, a hot toddy in one hand and Book One of The Ravishers of Pentagord—Phil’s trilogy — in the other. From the front bedroom I could hear Phil strumming his guitar and moaning softly. “What is it?” Gesh said. “What have you got — drugs?”

My throat thickened. I didn’t think I could get the words out. “It’s an article. In the paper. Come take a look.”

Gesh sighed, pushed himself up and started across the room. I was poised over the gray newsprint, scanning the article for the twentieth time, each insidious phrase poking at me like a hot scalpel. Gesh was in no hurry. He paused to refresh his toddy and slip a tape into his cracked-plastic battery-powered tape player (he’d unearthed two cassettes in the glove compartment of the Jeep Vogelsang had left us — something unidentifiable that sounded like a diva gargling in the shower, and an ancient Grateful Dead tape that repeatedly stuck on “Truckin’.” He opted for the latter).

Busted, down an Bourbon Street,

Set up, like a bowlin’ pin …

I watched Gesh’s face as he read the article. When he’d finished he took a sip of his toddy, looked up at me and said “So?”

“So?” I could feel the floodgates opening wide. “What’s with you? Don’t you know who this joker is?” I was shouting, rapping Jerpbak’s photograph with the back of my hand as if I could tear him in the flesh.

Gesh looked less certain of himself. He shrugged.

“This is the maniac that threw me up against the wall in the Eldorado County Jail when I bailed you guys out. Now he’s here, dedicating his life to busting dope farmers — I mean, doesn’t that strike you as a little strange?”

Gesh just stared at the paper, his jaw locked. The tape player slammed away at “Truckin’ “ over and over again: Truckin’ … Truckin’ … Truckin’… I stalked over and hit the eject button. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he murmured. And then more forcefully: “It’s a pisser. A real weird coincidence and a bad break. But nothing to go crazy over.”

Phil appeared in the doorway of his room, the guitar strung round his neck like an umpire’s chest protector. “What’s all the commotion?”

I showed him the article. He held the paper close to his face, licking his lips and sucking in his breath in quick little puffs as he read.

“We just have to be extra careful, that’s all,” Gesh said.

Phil folded the newspaper neatly and set it down on the counter. Then he looked me in the eye, poker-faced, and hit the refrain of “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”

“Very funny,” I said.

If Phil could clown about it, I couldn’t. I was tense, shaken, wired to the breaking point. Things were conspiring against us, all our sweat and toil come to naught: we weren’t going to wind up rich, we were going to wind up in jail.

“We’ll stick to the back roads,” Gesh said. Back roads? What was he talking about — there were nothing but back roads. “And instead of buying supplies in Willits, we’ll go all the way down to Santa Rosa, where nobody’ll notice.”

I didn’t want to end up in jail. But even worse than the thought of jail was the thought of the bust itself. A dozen troopers, in riot helmets and flak jackets, bursting through the door at first light, roughing us up, rifling our possessions, hauling us off in sorrow and subjection — it had become the standard nightmare. Still worse was its corollary, its sad and inevitable conclusion: detection would mean the end of the project, the failure of the farm.

Something had happened to me over the course of the past few weeks, something that transformed me with each crank of the come-along and thrust of the shovel: I’d become a believer. Perhaps it was the evangelical fervor with which Phil, Gesh and even Dowst regarded the project, perhaps it was the callus I’d developed on my hands and feet or the strips of muscle that corrugated my back and swelled the veins of my arms — but whatever it was, I’d been bitten more deeply than I realized. If I’d entered into the thing as a lark, an adventure, attracted as much by the action as the money, I was now fully, absolutely and zealously committed to making it work.

How else could I have gone on, day after day, pitching dirt and hammering fenceposts like a flunky? How else if I wasn’t certain in the very root of my being, in the last looping curve of my innermost gut, that we would succeed? No gains without pains, Poor Richard said. Plough deep … and you shall have corn to sell and to keep. Yes, indeed. We would subdue the land, make it produce, squeeze the dollars from it through sacrifice, sheer force of will and Yankee gumption. It was the dream of the pioneers themselves.

But I was no pioneer. I was edgy, nervous, a chronic quitter. If I understand now how deeply involved I was in the summer camp — it had to succeed, not so much for the money itself or what it could buy, but as the tangible and final result of our labor, the fruit of our enterprise, the proof of the dream — I did not understand it then. Not that night. Not there in the kitchen, my face hot with the glow of the lantern and the shock of Jerpbak. Maybe I was being irrational, loosing my fears like hobgoblins and bogies — but then the calendar and Jerpbak’s reemergence were irrational, too. I was spooked. I was angry.

“Okay,” Phil said, “we’re all a little paranoid. But just because of one newspaper article and a couple of cops that just happen to sit behind us in a diner, for Christ’s sake …” He waved his hand as if he were swatting gnats.

Gesh ran his fingers through his hair, then settled himself on the edge of the table and folded his arms. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, “I think you’re blowing things way out of proportion, man. Sure it’s bad news that this fucking jerk is launching a one-man crusade to bust dope farmers, but you got to remember there’s a lot of dope farmers out there. To think he’s out to get you is insane, it’s preposterous.”

“Dr. Freud, I presume?” Phil said. He tried to shake my hand but I pulled away.

“I mean, do you really think he bugged the ashtray in your Toyota or something — just because you made an illegal U-turn?”

I had to get out. The pressure was building in me like beer on a full bladder. I snatched my jacket from the chair and slammed out the door.

The night was torn with ragged clouds. Stars whitened the gaps, crickets pulsed like a heartbeat. Somewhere a tree groaned. There was a breeze — damp, fragrant — a southerly breeze that smelled as if it had rattled coconut palms and lifted the scent from hibiscus and frangipani. It wafted up now, a touch of warmth, out of the darkness that engulfed our lower growing areas. I gazed at the sky, clear in the interstices all the way back to the molars of the galaxy, and did not think the least thought about man’s fate, the unfathomable universe or group sex on Pentagord. I thought of things worldly and quotidian. Jerpbak. The greenhouse. Mysteriously blighted seedlings.

I breathed deeply — spring breeze, late April already — urinated in the model hole and fumbled my way to the greenhouse. The feather-light door swung back on the hinges I’d installed, and I stepped in and surrendered to the rank wild odor of working soil, of fertility and the dark germ of life. Dowst’s flashlight hung from a bent nail just inside the door. I found it and let the tube of light play over the ranks of Styrofoam cups, the stunted and late-emerging plants we’d yet to put in the ground and the flashing strips of aluminum foil Dowst had tacked up as reflectors. He’d arranged the planters on racks in ascending tiers — like grandstands — with a narrow footpath in between. Still agitated, I threaded my way up the path, thinking to find solace in the still, burgeoning atmosphere. It was a mistake. With the healthy plants already in the ground, the place looked barren. I surveyed it slowly, dismally, the husks of dead plantlings brushing at my pants, new growth spotting the remaining cups like a sprinkle in the desert.

Dowst had left for Marin three days earlier, in quest of the seeds we so desperately needed to make up our deficit (with just over a thousand seedlings planted, we needed at least nine hundred more to approach our original estimate). There were, he insisted, entrepreneurs who let their fall crops go to seed to provide for the germinatory needs of people like us — for a price, of course. A price that would come out of our net profit. And though it was a pity that the germination rate of his own seeds hadn’t been higher — that’s nature’s choice, he said, clucking his tongue — he was confident he could obtain more than enough new seeds to suit our purposes. As I stood there counting cups in the tenebrous cave of the greenhouse, I hoped he was right.

Nearly three-quarters of the cups were empty. In some there was no evidence whatever that anything had been planted; in others, wilted brown stalks gave testimony to some inscrutable depredation. Phil maintained that the locusts were responsible — couldn’t we hear them screeching in the trees? Gesh thought it might be aphids. Or beetles or something. Dowst, standing firm on the quality of his seeds, theorized that a fungus may have been attacking the roots of the young plants. I was puzzled, distressed. I’d watched the infinitesimal green filaments emerge from the earth, crooked as sweetly as dollar signs, and then come back the following morning to see that they’d been grazed to the root as I slept. Night after night I stalked the greenhouse, sitting in darkness, breath suspended, ears perked, waiting for the telltale crunch of mandibles or the scurry of soleless feet, and always I’d been skunked. There was nothing there — neither beetles nor aphids. Nor snails, leafhoppers, fruit flies or flying sheep for that matter. Just a silence, a silence so absolute I imagined I could hear the seeds rupturing their shells. Now, as I probed the cluttered corners with the flashlight, a sinking defeated feeling took hold of me — as if I’d been crushed under and sucked dry like a bad seed — and suddenly I understood that I was looking at the greenhouse for the last time.

It was an old feeling, compounded of fury and despair, a choking impotent rage that could only be salved by turning away, by running. I’d felt it when I reread the same page of Carlyle for the fiftieth time, stuffed my books in a trashcan and took the bus for San Francisco while Ronnie waited tables and old Dr. Pengrave sat checking his watch and fussing over the exam questions he’d never get to ask me. I’d felt it in Boston, looking out from the projectionist’s booth at the nodding heads and listening to the furtive clatter of white port bottles on the stained cement floor. I’d felt it when I was out of work and out of luck and Ronnie came home and told me she’d been accepted in the MBA program at Wharton and I looked up from my magazine and told her I wasn’t moving. Yes: then especially. I remembered the look on her face, the way she held out the acceptance letter as if it were the deed to an oil well or a certificate of beatification. I put you through four years of grad school, she said. Four years. Now it’s my turn.

Death, defeat, futility, that’s what the greenhouse said to me. I turned my back on it. Like a magic lantern — magnetic, irresistible — the flashlight pulled me across the junk-strewn morass of the lot and on up to the door of the Toyota. I dropped the flashlight in the high grass, dug for my keys and fired up the car with a roar. A moment later I was yawing through the undergrowth and heaving down the gutted road to the highway. The headlights grabbed at the darkness like pincers, trees rocked over me, a deer sprang up and vanished like an illusion. I thought of my apartment. Of movie theaters and Thai food and color TV. Of my stereo, my drip coffee maker, of daily newspapers, books, magazines, of the society of men — and women. Branches swiped at the windshield, a rock exploded against the under-surface of the car, ruts and gullies grabbed the wheel from me and flung it back again. Carefully, carefully, I told myself. I was on my way home.

By the time I reached the blacktop, I was thinking of baseball. I don’t know how or why — free association, I suppose. It began with a vision of the players emerging from the dugout against a green that ached, and the feel of the cold salt air of Candlestick Park. I could smell the sour scent of beer in wax cups, flat before it’s been tapped, and then I panned across the crowd: men in T-shirts, women in print dresses, the legions of kids in the bleachers waving their outsized gloves. I thought of balls wrapped in black electrician’s tape and bats that shudder in your hands, and then finally of Little League and my own eleven-year-old self. The memory was like a splinter under the nail.

Small for my age and late to develop, I’d devoted my life to baseball with the passion of an apostle: baseball was the be-all and end-all, the highest expression and fundamental raison for life in the cosmos. Regrettably, my skills were incommensurate with my enthusiasm, and I’d been shunted to right field the previous season — right field, the least dynamic, least significant position on the team, the venue of hacks and losers — and through the winter I burned to prove myself capable of playing closer to the action. That summer I tried out for third base. The hot corner. Where Brooks Robinson and the Boyer brothers routinely dove for scorching liners, leapt to rob batters of extra base hits, scooped up bunts as if they were gathering flowers, and in general demonstrated more skill, guts and panache than anyone on the field. All winter I’d shoveled snow and scrubbed dishes, hoarding nickels, dimes, quarters, the big flat shining half dollars I got for clearing the neighbors’ sidewalks, saving for the ne plus ultra — a new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s mitt endorsed by and stamped with the signature of Brooks Robinson himself. Eventually, a twenty-five-pound sack of change in hand, I trundled into the sporting-goods store and bought the glove. I worked it and oiled it, and when the snow was gone I was out till dark every day, fielding grounders. I practiced continually, obsessively, practiced till I could handle anything — bad hops, skimmers, liners, dribblers and worm-burners. I was ready.

We tried out on a sweet sunny day in June. The field was new, freshly bulldozed and totally barren. There were stones and pebbles everywhere. Five of us competed for third base while the coach, a laconic veteran of the Korean War whose son was the star pitcher, hammered grounders at us. The first kid handled every ball with fluid ease; the next two flubbed them miserably. Then it was my turn. Thirty-thousand ground balls had been hit to me over the course of the past three months; I was practiced and assured, ready for anything. The first ball came slamming at me over the rocky hardpan of the infield, I bent for it and it took a bad bounce, careening over my shoulder and into the outfield. All right, I thought, the field is like a gravel pit, don’t let it get to you. The same thing happened with the two succeeding chances. Humiliated, raging, I charged the next ball as soon as it came off the bat, pounced on it as if I were killing something for the pot, and heaved it six feet over the first baseman’s head. The coach looked disgusted. He spat in the dirt. Two more, he said. And then, before I’d even set up, the next ball came rocketing at me. I moved back, adjusting as it skipped over the stones in its path, and at the last instant I lifted my glove for the inevitable hop. No hop. The ball went right through my legs and on out to the left-field fence, where a bored-looking kid with an underslung jaw shagged it back.

Object, movement, the elusive patterns of fate: I had never in my life been so stung with despair and self-hatred. Even before the coach could bring the bat to his shoulder for my final chance, I came out of my crouch and flung my new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s glove into the parking lot. Then I ran. Ran through a gale of shouts and laughter, mounted my bike and pedaled up the street as if the Furies were shrieking in my ears. My breath came in sobs. At home, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword puzzle. It wasn’t fair, I told her, choking on the bitterness of it. I tried, I did. She pushed back her chair, got up from the table and looked down at me from her five feet and eight inches, sleeves rolled up, earrings dangling. Quitter, she said.

The memory arrested me. A moment before I’d been doing seventy, outracing the headlights, intent on San Francisco, and now I found myself slowing. Degree by degree, almost unconsciously, my foot eased up on the gas pedal. Signs, trees, fenceposts drifted up and trickled by, forty, thirty, twenty-five: I nearly pulled over. I was thinking of Phil and Gesh back in the cabin, sitting down to their fatty, starchy, tasteless meal, cracking jokes and dreaming the dream. Then the car rounded a bend and two dim spots of neon emerged from the darkness, soft and alluring, beacons in the night. I swung the wheel, and for the second time in my life pulled into the pitted parking lot of Shirelle’s Bum Steer.

Chapter 8

I sat in the car debating with myself. The threat of Jerpbak and the desolation of the greenhouse tugged me in one direction, undifferentiated needs and personal loyalty in the other. Was I walking out, or was I going to see this thing through? A pithy question. I sat there chewing on it as the night settled in around me and the jukebox thumped seductively from behind the yellowed windows of the tavern. At first, I had no intention whatever of going in — I’d stopped in the parking lot solely to think things out — but then I began to feel that what I needed was a drink. Just a single drink, something comforting and calming — a warm cognac, for instance. But no, it was too risky. I’d been burned once — the thought of the previous debacle at Shirelle’s made me wince — and it would be foolish to tempt the Fates yet again. No: a drink was out. Absolutely and positively.

After a while, though, I found myself casually examining the other cars in the lot, as if they could somehow give me a clue to their owners’ personalities, mores and penchants for unprovoked violence. There were three of them, all American-made, all beat. I recognized the sagging Duster with the I’M MORAL bumper sticker, but the others made no impression on me. The Duster, I realized, must have belonged either to Shirelle herself, one of the Indians or the wasted old character who’d restrained George Pete Turner on the unfortunate and only occasion I’d encountered him. But George Pete, as I vividly recalled (and here I unconsciously reached down to rub my calf in the vicinity of his dog’s initial assault), drove a pickup, as did Sapers. The chances, then, were that neither was present. Of course, all this was purely speculative in any case, as I had no intention whatever of passing through that redwood door.

It was then that I had an inspiration. I’d been sitting there for nearly half an, hour, getting nowhere, when it suddenly occurred to me to call Vogelsang. He was, after all, the manager of this operation, wasn’t he? Its guiding light and chief executive? I pictured him cozily ensconced with Aorta in his Bolinas museum, calmly chewing fish flakes while he rearranged his femur collection or sorted through his box of glass dog eyes. Yes. I’d call the son of a bitch and lay the whole thing in his lap, force him to make the decision for me. Hello? he’d say. Vogelsang, I’d say, this is Felix. I’m quitting. Yes, of course — why hadn’t I thought of it before?

The hinges of the big redwood door grated like marrowless bones, cigarette smoke and rockabilly yelping enveloped me, one foot followed the other, and once again I found myself standing before the bar in Shirelle’s Bum Steer. The place was precisely as I’d remembered it, no detail altered: the gallon jars of pickled eggs and bloated sausage, the souvenir pennant, the dusty bottles of liqueur. Shirelle, in mauve eyeshadow and a pink see-through blouse that looked like the top part of a nightie, was hunched over the telephone at the far end of the bar. In back, the customary Indians leaned over the pool table as if they were part of the déeAcor, while at the bar, two old men were engaged in a raucous debate. “I say it was the best thing I ever tasted in my life,” hooted the first, who seemed to be the randy old coffee drinker from the diner — or his morose counterpart. “Aaah, you’re a iggorant shitsack,” said the other, whom I recognized as George Pete Turner’s emaciated crony. “Any fool knows you can’t cook a decent piece of salmon without a slab of fatback pork to season the pan.”

I took a seat at the end of the bar and glanced significantly at Shirelle, who ignored me. She was exchanging passionate tidbits over the line with some up-country Lothario — Delbert Skaggs’s most recent successor, no doubt — and had neither time nor inclination to see to the needs of her customers. I was annoyed. But even more so when I saw that she was using the public telephone — obviously the only one in the place — which hung from the wall in a disused nook at the nether end of the bar. I dug out a ten-dollar bill, creased it, and laid it on the counter. “Shit,” snorted the old boy from the diner, “and I suppose them beans you fed me and Gerard last Saint Pat’s day was supposed to be something fancy, huh? Chili con carney, Texas style, is what you called it, didn’t you?” Pool balls clicked behind me, one maudlin jukebox tune dissolved in a jangle of trebly guitars and another started up without pause. I slapped the bar and jerked my finger at Shirelle.

I watched as she poured a final dollop of lewdness into the receiver, set it on the bar and came toward me, bosoms heaving beneath the flimsy blouse. She gave me a toothy smile that didn’t show the least hint of recognition — just as well, I thought — and said, “What’ll it be, honey?”

I ordered a Remy with a soda back. She poured herself three fingers of vodka and served me the cognac in a smudged water glass.

“You call them beans? I’d as soon have eat my own socks as that hog swill.”

“Godammit now, McCarey,” George Pete’s crony snarled, “you’re going to get me steamed you keep up like that. Thirty-seven years I put in in that kitchen at Tootses’ in San Jose and I’ll be a bare-assed monkey if I can’t out-chop, out-fry and out-charbroil a sorry scumbag like you any day of the week.”

“Thanks,” I said, as Shirelle set my drink down. “Are you going to be using the phone much longer?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, already leaning back toward the recumbent receiver like a dancer doing a stretching exercise, “just a minute or two more, that’s all.”

I lingered over my drink. Not simply because cognac is meant to be lingered over, but because I had neither the money nor the intent to overindulge: I was there to make a phone call. Period. I thought about nothing, the music droned on without pause, George Pete Turner’s crony waxed passionate on the subject of batter-dipped okra. When my glass had been empty for some minutes, I motioned once again for Shirelle, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was bent over the phone, both hands cradling the mouthpiece, her rear projecting at an angle and twitching idly. I began to develop an intense dislike for her.

I slapped the bar again, more violently than before. This time not only did Shirelle look up, but the two epicures as well. They’d been arguing a fine point of ham-hock preparation — whether to add flat or fresh beer to the stock — and both now desisted to turn and give me a wondering, distracted look. Shirelle again set the receiver down and joggled toward me. “Another?”

I pushed the glass forward. My voice was strung tight. “The phone?” I said.

Her laugh was like a bird of prey, shooting from its perch to swoop down and stun its object with a single explosive thrust. “My God!” she shrieked, “I’m so embarrassed! You know, I just forgot all about you, honey.” She puckered her lips and blew me a sympathetic kiss. “I’ll just be a sec,” and then the phone was stuck to the side of her face again, for all the world like some kind of malignant growth.

I was on my third drink before I finally got to the telephone. I couldn’t seem to find Vogelsang’s number in my wallet, so I had to go through information, losing a fistful of dimes in the process and systematically alienating three or four operators. He wasn’t listed, of course — except under one of his many aliases. The aliases were a joke, like the ads he ran in The Berkeley Barb. Dr. Bang was one of them. I tried it. No listing. With the aid of a fourth cognac, I began to recall others: O. O. Ehrenfurt, Malachi Mortis, Teet Creamburg. Nothing. I was frustrated, angry, nervous — each failure seemed to intensify the crisis, drum at my stomach, raise the ugly specter of Jerpbak from the grave of distilled spirits in which Shirelle had helped bury it. Just as I was about to give up, I remembered a company name he’d used two or three years back — Plumtree’s Potted Meats — and I had the exasperated operator try it. To my surprise and everlasting relief, she did show a listing for Plumtree.

My fingers trembled as I dialed, the words etched in acid on my tongue: I’m quitting, getting out, flying the coop, throwing in the towel. There was a click, the line engaged, and I was suddenly assaulted by a mechanical hiss immediately followed by an ineptly recorded version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” done entirely on Moog Synthesizer and what sounded like an off-key triangle. After a full two minutes of this, Vogelsang’s recorded voice came over the wire:

What is home without

Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

This was succeeded by a rasping evil snicker that suggested nothing so much as a Bluebeard or a Dr. Mengele in the midst of one of his experiments, and then the click that disengaged the line.

None of this had given me much satisfaction. Whereas a moment before I’d been anticipating the release of unburdening myself — of arguing, cursing, demanding explanations for the inexplicable and allowing myself to be soothed by Vogelsang’s crisp, confident tones and professorial diction — I was once again adrift, already two sheets to the wind and utterly paralyzed with indecision. What to do? Buzz into San Francisco and stuff loyalty, camaraderie, responsibility and trust, or creep back to the summer camp like a condemned man waiting for the blade to fall? I didn’t have a clue.

Huddled there in the corner and clutching the receiver as if it were a resuscitory device, I sipped at my drink and glanced forlornly round the room. A blue haze of cigarette smoke blurred the atmosphere and dimmed the feeble flicker of the wall fixtures (which were molded, I noticed, in the shape of steer horns). I could just make out the form of the three Indians, all lined up in a row now, gravely chalking their cues and contemplating the configuration of balls on the table before them as if it held the key to the secrets of the universe. Shirelle had joined the two epicures at the bar and was engaged in a hot debate over the length of time a three-minute egg should be cooked.

I finished my cognac. In combination, and on an empty stomach, the drinks were beginning to have a twofold effect — first, of intensifying my feelings of guilt and disloyalty, and second, of exacerbating the panic I felt over the nasty coincidences that had begun to infest my life. I sat there, half-drunk, warring with myself. I probed an ear for wax, toyed with a coaster that showed a red-nosed man crashing a car through his own bedroom wall, tapped my feet on the brass bar-rail. And then, as I couldn’t decide what to do — I found I was unable either to let go of the receiver or to get up from the barstool — I thought I might as well take things a step at a time and put something on my stomach. When Shirelle turned to pour herself another double vodka, I ordered a beer and two pickled eggs.

I don’t know what it was — the taste of the eggs, the odor of the vinegar or the odd amalgam of egg, vinegar, soda cracker, and beer — but I was suddenly skewered with nostalgia. These eggs, this beer, this depressing disreputable rundown backwater dive — together they recalled other eggs, other beer, other dives. I thought of a college friend who’d spent every waking moment cloistered in a saloon killing piss-yellow pitchers of draft beer and whose only sustenance derived from beer nuts, beef jerky and pickled eggs. Brain food, he called it. He drank up his book money, his date money, his food, rent, gas and clothes money, he grew pale, his flesh turned to butter. I worried about him — until I quit school. The graduation announcement came the following year, his name prominent at the top of the page, summa cum laude. I thought of a girl named Cynthia, who climbed mountains, wore lederhosen over her rippling calves and once let me creep under a table in a dark bar and stick my head between her thighs. I thought of fights, forged ID’s, vomit-streaked Fords. The eggs tasted as if they’d been unearthed in an Etruscan tomb, the beer was flat. I ate mechanically. Faces drifted into my consciousness, epoch by epoch, counters on an abacus. Then I thought of Dwight Dunn.

Like Phil, Dwight was a touchstone. We’d gone to school together, double-dated, squeezed pimples side by side, we’d struck out, scored, experimented with tobacco, alcohol and drugs together, we’d postured, pronounced, chased the same women, earnestly discussed Nietzsche and Howlin’ Wolf late into the night. Dwight had been best man at my wedding; when his father died I flew in from the West Coast and sat up with him. We were children, adolescents, bewildered adults. Dwight had stayed in New York — he was living on East 59th Street now and working for a public relations firm — but we’d kept in touch. Unlike Phil, he was a straight arrow, steady — I could picture the baggy chinos, madras shirts and Hush Puppies he favored, and the look of pained concentration (as if he’d been forced to decipher Finnegans Wake while undergoing electroshock treatment) the contact lenses gave him. Dwight, I thought, alcohol tugging at my flesh, good old Dwight. At that moment I was visited with my second inspiration of the evening: I would call him, call him and listen to his soft stuttering laugh and the comforting rhythms of his speech.

I dialed like a man in a burning building. Come on, I thought, counting the clicks, and then the information operator was on the wire, quick and efficient, and I scribbled the number on my bar napkin and called collect.

“Hello?” Dwight’s voice sounded distant, weary. For an instant I thought I’d wakened him — but no, it was just after ten in New York.

The long-distance operator interceded with a deadpan impression of Desi Arnaz: “Colleck call for any wan from Fee-lix: will you ’cept the charge?”

“What?” A tapping came over the line, and I envisioned a repairman in Kansas hammering a downed wire back in place. “Yes, yes — put him on.”

“Dwight?”

“Felix?”

“How you doing?”

“Fine,” he said. “What’s up?”

I couldn’t tell him, couldn’t give him specifics anyway. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m a little depressed.” Just then Shirelle threw back her head and laughed like an abandoned old whore with a meter on every orifice. “Did I tell you I’m rooming with Phil?”

We talked for half an hour before I understood the reason I’d called. “Listen, Dwight,” I said finally, “you think you could read me something from one of your notebooks?”

Dwight was a compulsive record-keeper — no, he was pathological, half a step removed from the crazy who keeps his own feces in labeled fruit jars. Not only did he list every experience he’d ever had — everything from breaking up with his girlfriend, rupturing his spleen or being victimized by pickpockets in Madrid to buying a pair of shoelaces — he kept track of every meal he’d eaten, the clothes he wore, states, counties and municipalities visited and distances traveled, gifts given and received, feelings felt, gas, electricity and water consumed, the number of points he’d scored in an intramural basketball game in junior high, cab fares, tips, the books he’d read, movies he’d seen (including where and with whom), records, shoes and nose drops purchased, every bowel movement, hiccough, belch and whimper of his life. He could tell you how many streetlamps line FDR Drive and how many times he’d passed under them, give you a blow-by-blow account of a trip he’d made to visit his grandparents when he was thirteen, describe Radio City Music Hall in terms of the number and texture of the seats.

I could appreciate what he was trying to do — each of us to a greater or lesser degree has the same impulse, after all, the same need to impose order on our sloppy irrational lives in the face of an indifferent universe. I could appreciate it, and benefit from it as well. My past and Dwight’s intersected at any number of points: he’d recorded my history, too.

Within moments I could hear the rustle of turning pages, and then Dwight’s familiar nasal tones: “Know how many points you scored against Fox Lane on January 18, 1967?”

Nineteen sixty-seven. Amazing. I had a vision of myself — alive, free, untrammeled and untroubled, dribbling an inflated sphere up and down a polished wooden floor as if nothing else in the world mattered. “How many?” I breathed.

“Twelve.” A page turned. “You remember who else was on the team?”

I listed them, all of them, right down to the benchwarmers — the thyroid freaks with the pinheads and the muscular little guys who weren’t quite quick enough to make first-string guard.

Then he was reading: “June 10, 1969. Picked up Felix at eight p.m. in my father’s Charger, took fifteen point two gallons of gas at thirty-one cents a gallon for a total of four seventy-one, and then drove to Port Chester to pick up Sherrie Ryan and Ginger Beardsley. I was wearing my new maroon bellbottoms and …”

The voice went on, precise and evenly modulated, the voice of order and reason, the voice that proved my past and promised the future. I just listened, nodding, memory blooming like a field of clover. We must have talked for an hour and a half. I was working on my third beer and sixth egg when we finished, and feeling that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. “Dwight,” I said, my voice a pant of gratitude, “thanks.” The receiver fell into its cradle with a click gentle as a kiss.

When I finally looked up, I saw that the Indians had gone — the light over the pool table had been extinguished and the rear of the bar faded into shadow. The two epicures at the bar were still there, though, and I saw that they’d been joined by a hefty young couple who brooded over a pair of highballs like inspectors from the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms. Shirelle was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly George Pete’s crony lifted his head and roared, “Soak them beans, for Christsake!” as if he were announcing a cavalry charge. The other old fellow seemed pretty far gone — he just waved his hand vaguely.

I was feeling better than I had for weeks. I’d made my decision (of course I was staying; I’d go to jail forever — welcome it — lock myself in at Attica with savage perverts or swim out to Devil’s Island, before I’d let down my friends and buddies), and it was as if I’d been set free, the fetters loosened, no more vulture come to feed on my liver. How could I even have thought of quitting? There was nothing more vital than the kind of friendship I had with Dwight, with Phil, with Gesh, and it was worth any sacrifice to sustain it. The alcohol spoke to me, my abraded nerves sank into their sheaths like sleeping tortoises. I felt light, holy, ecstatic: I could have gotten up and kissed everybody in the place.

What I would do, I decided, was have one more cognac to celebrate the rite of passage I’d endured, and then head on up the hill to the summer camp, get a good night’s sleep and go out in the morning to cultivate my garden, as resigned and sensible as Candide on the shores of Marmora. As if on cue, Shirelle reappeared, emerging from the door behind the bar with a case of no-name scotch, gin, vodka and rum. I smirked at her like some dapper character out of a forties movie and knocked over my empty beer glass. “Shirelle,” I said, my tongue somehow glued to the roof of my mouth, “one more Remy, please. With a soda back.” And then, as if this simple request needed amplification: “I’m celebrating.”

Shirelle’s eyes were veined with red, as if she’d just finished a hundred laps in an over-chlorinated pool. The bottle floated in her hand like a helium balloon, and on the first pass she missed the glass entirely, splashing bar, coaster, her left hand and my right with expensive imported booze. Then she connected, filled the water glass halfway, wordlessly snatched up my money and lurched over to join the fat-faced pair at the other end of the bar.

“Half a quart of vinegar, a box of peppercorns and a whole shaker of salt — the whole damn thing — to a gallon of water,” George Pete’s crony said.

“What’s that for?” asked the broader of the two new arrivals, who seemed to be female. “Footsoak?”

“Oh, gawd.” George Pete’s crony rolled his bulging eyes. “Ever’body’s a iggoramus tonight — that’s my genuine Chesapeake Bay crab boil.”

The other old boy, the one in coveralls, was asleep, hands in his lap and forehead pressed to the bar as if he were a devotee of some obscure Far Eastern religion.

I felt warm. A voice mewled over the jukebox: Well, here I stand,/All alone with a broken heart,/I took three bennies/And now my semi-truck won’t start. Time escaped me. I had another cognac.

It was then, just after I’d ordered the second post-phone-call drink — or was it the third? — that I felt a pressure on my arm and turned to see that someone had taken possession of the stool next to mine. I was too far gone to be startled: it was Savoy. Her hand was on my arm, a tall frosted glass of Coke sizzled on the bar before her. She was wearing a low-cut blouse and one of those complicated uplift bras that separate the bosoms and present them like ripe mangoes. “Hi,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Oh,” I said, shrugging, waving my hand and licking the tips of my fingers like a third-base coach in the throes of a seizure, “it’s no big thing. Been keeping busy, that’s all.” Eugene’s locket clung to her throat like a magnet. I wanted to lick it.

“Yeah?” she said, grinning wide. “You living around here now or what?”

Boom, went the jukebox. Boom, boom, boom.

“Wanna dance?” I said.

She shook her head no and took a sip of her Coke. Pink lipstick, white straw. “Your name’s Felix, right?”

I nodded. “And you’re Savoy.” I grinned like a deviate, like a billy goat.

She ignored me. Sucked thoughtfully at her straw a moment. “So you guys living up here now or what?” she said, repeating her question with a slight but significant variation.

“Blood raw!” roared George Pete’s crony.

His interlocutor, who’d partially revived and propped his head on a bent elbow, squinted one eye and hissed, “Your ass!”

“Not really,” I lied.

She laughed, a rich musical sound that inflamed every fiber of my reproductive tract. “No,” she said, leaning into me, “I really want to know. I like you guys, I do.”

“Well, if you put it that way,” I said, making a stab at wit and raising my eyebrows to acknowledge the sexual innuendo, “we live in Berkeley, but we’ve been coming up here a lot — oh, it must be three or four times now — to go fishing, you know, trout and all.”

“Come off it. You’re living up by Lloyd Sapers’s place, aren’t you?”

“Sapers? Never heard of him.”

She looked offended, her mouth puckered in a little moue. “What do you take me for — stupid or something?”

“Hah!” shouted George Pete’s toothless compatriot, apropos of some culinary conviction forcefully expressed. “Hah! Hah! Hah! Don’t make me laugh.”

Savoy was staring into my eyes, cold and intent. A moment ago I’d felt warm, lit up, ready to lick the world: now I felt cold, cold, cold. “Come off it,” she repeated, as if she’d forgotten her lines. “Come off it, will you? Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there.”