Budding Prospects

Chapter 1

In June, the weather altered abruptly. Whereas before we’d shivered through a perpetual riveting downpour that made every moment of hole-digging or fence-stringing a curse and a trial, now suddenly we blistered under an unmoving sadistic sun. It was as if we’d been magically transported — house, weeds, garbage and all — from the windward coast of Scotland to the desert outside Tucson. One night the wind rattled up out of the south with the choking roar of an invading army — trucks in low gear, feet tramping across the roof — and in the morning it was clear. And dry. So dry that Phil’s pompadour went permanently limp and our bathtowels stiffened to the consistency of redwood bark. You could feel the change in your nostrils, in your throat; you could hear it in the dry, tortured groans of the house, see it in the shimmering air and wilting weeds and in the slow-wheeling helices of vultures riding the thermal currents. Ninety-five degrees, ninety-six, one-oh-two. Lizards appeared from nowhere, as if they’d been conjured from the air, hummingbirds hung like mobiles over the bells of flowers, streams fell back and left their banks exposed like toothless gums. Mud caked, dried, fragmented to dust. The arid season was upon us.

We were ready for it. As ready as the reddest-necked cracker in the Imperial Valley, as ready as the Israelis on the Negev. Or so we thought. By May 31, when workers elsewhere were grilling hot dogs and singing “God Bless America,” we were putting the finishing touches to an elaborate irrigation system engineered by Vogelsang, approved by Dowst and realized (i.e., hauled, hammered, cut, glued, joined and bled over) by Phil, Gesh and me. The mainstay of this system was a used gasoline-powered water pump for which Vogelsang had paid $100 at a foreclosure sale. Theoretically, the pump would suck water from the year-round stream at the base of the mountain, force it through the camouflaged lengths of one-inch plastic pipe we’d laid and connected, and then push it all the way up the mountain’s five hundred fifty vertical feet and into the big horse-troughs situated above the Khyber Pass, our highest growing area. From there, the water would gravity-feed to smaller reservoirs consisting of clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums, and thence to the hand-held hoses from which we would provide each plant with the two to three gallons of water it needed daily.

The first problem we encountered was a familiar one: noise. When all the pipe had been painted, laid and linked, and all the connections made to the reservoirs, we gathered at the base of the hill to fire up the pump and inaugurate the system. It was a ceremonial occasion, and we stood around clutching slippery cans of beer while Vogelsang bent to make minute adjustments to the gasoline feed, the filter, the carburetor. Mosquitoes whined, the stream slid over obstructions with a languid splash and trickle. I thought of railroad men come together for the driving of the final spike, or boutonniered politicians toasting the first explosive rush of water that flooded the Erie Canal.

The day was hot, one of the first true scorchers we’d had, the sun raging through the trees like a forest fire. We were swallowed up in the clot of vegetation that lined the streambed, and it seemed as if the leaves caught and held the air until it reared up and slapped us in the face. Gesh was running sweat, his eyes slits, cheekbones glistening as if they’d been oiled; Phil’s clothes were soaked through; I could taste the salt on my lips. Only Vogelsang seemed oblivious to the heat. Dressed in goggles, gloves, surgeon’s mask and jumpsuit, and with a.44 magnum strapped incongruously round his waist, he had spent the better part of the morning creeping through the scrub to inspect each joint and coupling along the pipeline. Now, as he hunched over the pump with wrench and screwdriver, I was surprised to discover that not a single damp spot darkened the khaki jumpsuit. I was marveling over this revelation—he doesn’t even sweat, I thought in amazement — when he stood, brushed the knees of his pants and jerked the starter cord.

Our cheers were drowned in the roar of the engine, which was at least six decibels louder than the one we’d abandoned outside the cabin. The beers popped soundlessly, blue-black coils of exhaust clutched at us before twisting off to darken the sky, the engine screamed its animate agony. Phil looked unhappy, Gesh gritted his teeth. If Vogelsang was disturbed, he gave no sign of it — he merely stood there, arms akimbo, staring down at the thing as if he were contemplating a painting in a gallery. Aorta never even turned her head. In shorts and halter top, she perched on a rock in midstream and serenely tapped her foot to a private rhythm, her ability to register auditory shock evidently impaired through her association with the Nostrils. Rat-a-rap-rap, screamed the engine, rap-rap-rap. Gesh bellowed something in my ear, but it was lost in the machine-gun rattle of the engine; I concentrated on swallowing without choking on my tongue. After five minutes or so, Vogelsang shut the thing down, then lifted his surgeon’s mask and turned to us. “You’ll have to dig a pit.”

We dug. Four feet down in yellowish clay. Sweat flowing, mosquitoes harassing, beer gone sour in our throats. Then we set the pump in the trench, threw a slab of plywood over it and buried the muffler in sand. “That should do it,” Vogelsang said.

As Gesh, Phil and I started up the hill, he turned the engine over again and I thought at first we were under attack, the fulminating blast of machinery so unexpected, so obscene and startling in the quiet of the woods. Phil shouted something to the effect that laboratory rats chewed off their own feet when subjected to loud and unremitting noise, but already the trees had begun to muffle the blare of the pump, taking the edge off it in the way a mute softens a trumpet. We would barely hear it from the house, I realized, but Gesh, who had long since identified Vogelsang as the enemy, wasn’t mollified. “Terrific,” he said, loping up the hill. “That’s about as subtle as the London blitz.”

The second problem was more complicated, human rather than mechanical. The problem was Lloyd Sapers. According to legal agreement, Sapers had access to the central road bisecting our property and plunging down into the valley to the southeast. This was his fire road — his escape route in the event that the primary road was blocked by fire, no mean consideration in an area that grew progressively drier until at the end of the season the hills were as volatile as balls of newsprint soaked in gasoline.

On the morning after we’d broken in the irrigation system, Vogelsang, Aorta and I were gathered around the breakfast table while Phil and Gesh watered the Khyber Pass and Dowst huddled in the greenhouse, trying to perform horticultural miracles with a handful of withered seeds and a bucket of Nutri-Grow. Since his arrival two nights earlier — he’d come, reluctantly, to oversee the completion of the irrigation system — Vogelsang had been jumpy as an air-raid warden. Nervous about everything from poison oak to pot poachers to detection and arrest by the DEA, FBI, IRS and the Willits Sheriff’s Department, he was practically clonic, every facial muscle twitching, fingers drumming the tabletop, legs beating like pistons. In a word, he was wired.

This was understandable. With a forest of eighteen-inch plants in the ground, we were all edgy — they had the goods on us now — but Phil, Gesh and I had come to grips with our fears. Or at least we tried to obliterate them through the abuse of drugs and alcohol and an unwavering commitment to the sustaining visions of Rio, Cajun seafood houses and fat bank accounts. We had no other choice: unlike Vogelsang, we had to live with the threat of exposure day in and day out. For well over a month, for that matter, I’d been living with the knowledge of what Savoy had said to me that night—everybody knows what you guys are doing up there—a festering little secret, hidden close. Before the words had passed her lips I was on my feet, pretending I hadn’t heard her, making apologies. I glanced at my watch, slapped my forehead, shrugged into my jacket and staggered out the door like a hamstrung deer. When I got back to the cabin, the lights were out. Just as well, I thought, inching my way through the darkness to my room, spun round with alcohol, panic and the finality of my decision. I was in this thing to the end: Give me pot, or give me death, I thought, giggling to myself. No teenager with an uplift bra and unsized eyes was going to scare me off it, nor Jerpbak, voodoo calendars or shotguns, either. I could take it, liberated by the pledge I’d made myself, burst from under the pall of the sickness unto death and into the light of faith. But why worry Phil and Gesh?

Now, with Vogelsang twitching across the table and rattling on about Krugerrands, gypsum and Oriental rugs, I couldn’t resist sticking it to him just a bit, as he’d stuck it to me over the issue of the guns. “Oh, by the way,” I said, cutting him off in the middle of a panegyric to Bokharan weavers, “did I tell you a plane came over the other day?”

Vogelsang set down his spoon, shot a glance out the window and then fumbled in his pocket for the vial of breath neutralizer. “Really?” he said, a barely perceptible sob cracking his voice.

“Cessna, I think. One of those little jobs with the sculpted cockpit and the propeller out front?”

He nodded. His features were drawn together, a string bag tightening at the neck, and the veins in his temple began to pulse.

The plane had come roaring over the hill, big as a truck, no more than three hundred feet up. It buzzed the house twice, then circled the property and vanished over the far ridge. When it appeared Phil and I were out in the yard, fully exposed, unloading lengths of PVC pipe from the back of the pickup. First there was the explosion of noise, then the dust and the big swooping shadow, and then Phil was bolting for the house shouting, “Load up the car!” He’d actually tossed two boxes of his priceless mementoes into the back of the Jeep before I could calm him down.

“Probably from that airstrip in Willits,” Vogelsang said. “One of those weekend daredevils.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. But it wasn’t pleasant, that’s for sure. With two thousand holes in the ground this place must look like Swiss cheese from up there.”

Vogelsang rapped the tabletop with the vial of breath sanitizer, then raised it to his mouth for a quick fix, as if vigilance against halitosis were the first step in his plan to subvert detection and subdue the world to his fiduciary advantage. Aorta slouched over an uneaten bowl of Familia, absorbed in a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, her nose ring flaring in a ray of early-morning sunlight. I was about to amplify the story of the Cessna—the eye in the sky, Gesh had called it — when suddenly the cabin began to tremble on its frame and a rumbling burst of sound threw me from my chair.

Earthquake? Lightning bolt? The Russian invasion? The three of us lurched back from the table and rushed to the window, where we watched in stupefaction as an odd little parade passed in review. Sapers, on a huge thundering bulldozer, was steaming along the road adjacent to the house, followed by his son, Marlon, on a flatulent Moped. Intent on the controls and hunched in his filthy coveralls, Sapers never even turned his head; Marlon, his glasses glinting in the sun and big fleshy thighs and rear engulfing the bike as an amoeba might engulf a food particle, looked up, flashed us the peace sign, and then vanished into the trees along with his father.

For an instant we were immobilized, struck dumb with panic and outrage. Then all three of us were out the door in blistering pursuit. “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” I choked as we leapt obstacles in the field and sprinted into the narrow roadway like hurdlers coming on for the tape. I was incensed, mortified, shot through with homicidal rage. What if he blundered off the road and into one of the growing areas? What if he caught sight of Gesh and Phil with the hoses or heard the pump? Vogelsang cursed, a series of truncated, doglike grunts, as he pumped his legs and flailed his goggles like a weapon; Aorta, gritting her teeth, ran neck-and-neck with us for a hundred yards or so before she stumbled and pitched forward into the dirt. We hardly noticed.

Vogelsang and I were nearly at the bottom of the hill, a few hundred yards east of the water pump, when we ran out of breath and slowed to an agitated, stiff-legged walk. Hearts hammering, we hurried along the roadway until we emerged from a stand of laurel to see Sapers up ahead of us, maneuvering the bulldozer as if he were taking evasive action. As we drew closer, we could see Marlon standing in the shade of a tree and drinking something from a thermos, while his father dropped the blade of the bulldozer and began slamming away at the surface of the road. “Oh, Christ,” Vogelsang said, quickening his gait, “he’s grading the road.”

He was indeed. We watched helplessly as he reversed gears, swung right and left, rumbled forward behind a ridge of detritus, cleared culverts, crushed vegetation, leveled and de-rutted the nearly impassable roadway. Gears wheezed, black diesel smoke snatched at the sky. “Hey!” I shouted, but the big polished treads just kept grinding along. Sweat coursed over my body — streams, rivulets, mighty deltas — the sun raked my face and thrust a clawing hand down my throat. Beside me, Vogelsang danced in place, pogo-ing up and down like a Masai tribesman. Though his face was concealed, I took his body language to indicate that he was feeling as disturbed, confused and impotent as I was. A few minutes later Aorta limped up to join us, and after watching the bulldozer churn back and forth a moment longer, we turned as if by accord and strolled over to where Marlon stood in the shade of a twisted oak.

“Hello,” Vogelsang said, peeling back his surgical mask. Marlon’s immediate reaction was to bend awkwardly for the big plastic thermos and cradle it in his arms, as if he was afraid we’d come to snatch it away. He didn’t say a word, merely blinked at us out of pale demented eyes. His head was cropped as closely as Aorta’s, and it seemed disproportionately small against the bulk of him, the head of an ostrich or a sleepy brontosaur. “You know how far up the road your father’s planning to go?” Vogelsang asked.

Marlon looked wildly from Vogelsang’s face to mine, as if we’d asked him to betray his family to the Gestapo or drop his pants and recite poetry, before his eyes finally settled on Aorta. A change suddenly came over his face. He gave her a long, lingering, stupefied look, a look compounded of wonder, greed and unbridled anarchic lust, and then he flushed red and turned away.

“Marlon,” I snapped, striving for that tone of inquisitorial menace and condescension mastered by schoolmarms, drill sergeants and professional torturers, “you’re on private property now, you know — our property — and we want to know just what you think you’re doing here.” Meanwhile, I noticed with mounting panic that Sapers was moving his bulldozer back up the road in the direction from which we’d just come — toward the hill and our burgeoning secret.

Marlon looked down at his feet (they were encased in black sneakers the size of griddles), and then lifted the thermos to his mouth and took a huge slobbering swallow that left his chin streaked with dark liquid and his shirtfront damp. He bobbed his head and his mouth began to work, some terrible trauma pushing itself up from his inner depths to convulse his frame with seismic shudders. “Drinking Coke,” he said finally with a sob. Then he turned his back on us and his great fleshy shoulders began to heave.

All at once there was a hoot of surprise from Sapers and we jerked round to watch him ram the bulldozer into neutral and leap down from the thing in a geyser of water. Even from where we were standing I could see the ruptured plastic pipe, snapped like a twig and flung over the cutting edge of the blade in a sorry inverted V. Water spurted thirty feet into the air — a magic fountain, a gusher, a lid-flipped hydrant on 142nd Street — and suddenly we were running again. Out of breath, crazed, our cards laid out on the table for anyone to read.

As we drew closer I could see that Sapers was clearly bewildered, the Willits Feed cap clutched in one grimy hand while the other scratched at the back of his head. “Lloyd!” Vogelsang shouted, stripping back goggles and hood, and Sapers turned to us with the blank uncomprehending stare of a flood or quake victim. “Lloyd, it’s me, Vogelsang.” Sapers had, of course, been aware of us all along, but had chosen to go about the business at hand rather than bother with social amenities. He had nothing to say to us in any case. Now, though, as I saw the look of enlightenment fan across his features, I realized that he couldn’t have recognized Vogelsang in his jumpsuit. He’d probably mistaken him for an escapee from the burn ward or a commando versed in chemical warfare — just another manifestation of the hostile weirdness we’d brought to his sleepy corner of the woods.

We stood beside him now, Vogelsang grinning, Aorta scowling, the water slashing up into the burnt sky and plummeting down to explode in the dust. I felt like a circus animal — tiger, bear, lion — driven by the whip and making my final approach to the burning hoop. “What in God’s hell is that?” Sapers said finally. He was referring to the plastic pipe, which we’d buried beneath the disused roadway some two weeks earlier. I shrugged. Aorta put her hands on her hips and gave him a why-don’t-you-go-fuck-yourself stare. “Beats me,” Vogelsang said. “Christ, Lloyd, you know I hardly just bought the place — there’s all sorts of surprises here.”

“But, but …” For the first time since I’d had the misfortune of meeting him, Sapers seemed at a loss for words. “But,” he stammered, waving his hand to take in the entire scene, “I been grading this road for twenty years and there’s never been no pipes in here before.”

Vogelsang laughed, a maniacal, wound-up, child-molester’s laugh. “Christ,” he said, repeating himself, as if the invocation of a higher authority could somehow get him off the hook, “I just don’t know how to explain it, Lloyd. It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.” Vogelsang patted frantically at his pockets, searching for the breath neutralizer, which he finally located and used with obvious relief. “I guess we’ll just have to contact the DWP and see what they’ve been doing up here.”

Sapers looked skeptical — he knew as well as I did that the water department had no business out in the hind end of the wilderness, that Vogelsang’s implication was as preposterous and unfounded as if he’d attributed the pipe to Soviet intervention or UFOs. From skepticism, he shifted to suspicion. I could see the change in his face, could see that he was about to say something more, something tougher, something that would poke holes in the entire fabric of lies we’d thrown up to mask our real purpose, when suddenly the gush of water fizzled out. One moment it was spouting like Old Faithful, and the next it was the trickle of a child at a urinal.

“I’ll be damned,” Sapers said.

Vogelsang put on a look of consternation and wonder, a look as phony as mine. The water had given out for a simple and intelligible reason: the pump had shut down. As programmed. We’d gauged the amount of gasoline required to run the pump until all our reservoirs were filled — at that point, the pump ran out of gas and shut itself down. Chuff-chuff, bang. Simple as that.

We were standing around scratching our heads when suddenly a shadow fell across my back, and I swung round to confront a dejected Marlon, the thermos wedged beneath one fleshy arm, his eyes red with weeping. Behind us, the earthmover idled with a subdued chuffing roar, its surfaces glistening with water. Vogelsang had stepped forward to make a show of casually tossing the pipe aside, as if it meant nothing in the world to him — as if, like the rocks and trees and insects, it were just another manifestation of the marvelous in an endlessly puzzling universe — and was assuring Sapers that he’d look into the matter and straighten things out with the DWP or “whoever it was that was responsible.” Marlon began to whimper.

“What’s with you?” Sapers snarled.

The boy pointed a thick accusing finger at me. “He … he yelled at me, pop.”

Sapers gave me a quick withering glance, a glance of contempt, hatred and disgust, then shot his eyes at his son. “Aaah, shut yer face, Fathead.” Then he looked at me again, a wicked little grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “So,” he roared, “how’s the writin’ goin’, Shakespeare?”

The third problem was neither mechanical nor human. It was instead a manifestation of the wilderness itself, of nature red in tooth and claw, of the teeming, irrational life that surrounds and subsumes us and that our roads and edifices and satellites struggle so hard to deny. It became evident about two weeks after the bulldozer incident. Vogelsang had long since repaired to the cool, umbrageous, sumac-free corridors of his Bolinas lodge, the sun had mounted a degree or two higher in the blistering sky, and the vital, life-sustaining flow of the irrigation system had settled into a pattern of smooth reliability we’d begun to take for granted. Then, one torrid morning (we watered in the morning and evening, for obvious reasons and in accordance with Dowst’s superfluous instructions), as I picked up the hose to drench our Jonestown growing area in cool translucent aqua pura, I was stunned to find that none was forthcoming. Perplexed, I flailed the hose along its coiled length, stretched it, peered into the nozzle like a clown in a slapstick routine. Nothing. Next, I followed the hose to the nearest cluster of 55-gallon drums, only to find them empty, and finally made my lung-wrenching way up the precipitous incline to the main reservoir above the Khyber Pass. There I discovered that all six 330-gallon horse-troughs were dry, and concluded that the pump must have malfunctioned. But after stumbling back down the spine of the mountain, through thorn and briar and banks of stinging nettle, I found that the pump had in fact dutifully consumed its gas, pumped its water and shut itself down. So where was the water?

My cohorts were hunched blearily over breakfast when I stepped through the door and informed them that there was a major break somewhere along the pipeline. They yawned, scratched, farted, their eyes like hunted things. A fork rang out as it made contact with knife or plate, two pairs of lips sucked at the rims of coffee mugs. Since the heat had set in, we’d taken to staying up late into the night, drinking, shooting the bull, playing poker, Monopoly, and pitch, and resting through the ferocious dizzying heat of the afternoon. We alternated morning watering assignments, Dowst pulling his weight like the rest of us — when he was there. On this particular morning, as on most mornings, he was not there. No: he was in Sausalito, in his breezy, ocean-cooled apartment, no doubt knocking himself out to come up with the additional seeds we so desperately needed.

Gesh looked up from a greasy plate of scrambled eggs and chorizo and asked if I’d checked the pump. I nodded. Phil was bent over a sketch pad. The fires of artistic expression had been lately rekindled in him by the proximity of so much antique junk — an entire yardful of bedsprings, machine parts and dismantled automobiles — and he was working out the blueprint for a major new sculpture that promised to be “a monument to our heroic agricultural efforts.” Without glancing up he asked if I’d checked the upper reservoir. “Uh-huh,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee that looked and tasted like molasses laced with stomach acid.

There was a ruminative silence, during which a lizard darted out of the breadbox and lashed across the wall, and then Gesh set down his fork and drained his juice glass in a single decisive gulp. “Sounds like there’s a break in the line,” he announced.

We found it almost immediately. The main line from the pump had been breached just below the Jonestown area, punctured in half a dozen places as if savaged with a sharp instrument or blasted at close quarters with a.22. “Kids,” Phil said. “Fourteen-year-old punks.” The pipe, which we’d simply laid out on the surface of the ground, certainly looked as if it had been intentionally vandalized. It was a tense moment. If adolescent vandals were roaming the woods, not only could they wreak havoc on our operation and make off with half the crop, they could expose us to the authorities as well — or perhaps they already had. I watched as the realization filtered through my companions’ faces, fear and loathing and murderous intent flickering in their eyes. “Maybe it was Sapers,” I said, knowing it wasn’t. “Or Marlon?”

It was Gesh, the Angeleno, the city kid, who came up with the conjecture that proved conclusive. “Animals,” he said. “Something big.” We looked closer. Sure enough, there were the telltale signs: coiled heaps of dung flecked with berries, clumps of stinking reddish hair, tracks the size of Ping-Pong paddles. In the first rush of paranoia we’d somehow managed to overlook them, but now we saw clearly that the agency of destruction was animal rather than human. I guessed that the vandal must have been a bear, but if so, the creature’s motives remained obscure. What was the attraction in a twenty-foot length of mottled plastic pipe? Gesh had an answer for this, too: the bear was thirsty. And lazy. Instead of clambering down the hill to the stream, he could drink his fill — and have a shower in the bargain — simply by puncturing any link of our aqueduct he happened across.

The existence of the presumptive bear was confirmed three days later when Phil, buzzing along the lower road on the 125-cc Kawasaki, rounded a corner to discover an obstruction in his path. The obstruction, on closer examination, turned out to be a lumpy, broad-beamed, auburn-colored thing squatting over a fresh mound of berry-flecked excrement: viz., the bear. With a blare of horror the bear lurched up, feinted to the right and then scrambled off down the roadway, Phil in pursuit. The animal’s great shaggy hindquarters pumped at the dirt, Phil gripped the accelerator like a fighter ace zeroing in for the kill, leaves rushed by in a blur. One hundred yards, two hundred yards, three. And then, as if he’d been schooled in diversionary tactics, the bear suddenly skewed off into a scrub-choked ravine, while Phil, caught up in the heat of the chase, rammed a downed tree, tore the front wheel from the bike and did a triple-gainer into the stiff brown brush. The Kawasaki was wrecked, and Phil suffered a strained shoulder in addition to contusions both major and minor, but at least we’d firmly and finally established the identity of our antagonist.

An uneventful week slipped by, the heat like the flat of a sword, dull and stultifying, and then the bear struck again. This time he chewed through a pipe on the lower slope, and the enormous pressure of the gravity-feed shattered the plastic and sent a jet of water rocketing forty feet in the air. By the time we arrived on the scene, the dripping ecstatic creature had lumbered off, taking a section of deer fencing and eight healthy cannabis plants with him. “This has got to stop,” Gesh growled, kicking angrily at the ravaged pipe. I watched his face through its dangerous permutations, watched as he flung sticks and stones at the mute leaves that surrounded us, bearlike himself in his bulk and his rage. Finally he turned to Phil and me to announce in a dead flat tone that the bear had to go: it was him or us.

Gesh put out poisoned baits that afternoon — marrow bones and kidneys soaked in strychnine — while Phil and I replaced the length of damaged pipe. The bloody heaps of flesh didn’t look particularly appetizing, covered as they were with flies both quick and dead, but I assumed it wouldn’t make much difference to a scavenging garbagophagist with a taste for plastic pipe and Campbell’s Chunky Soup cans. I was wrong. As far as we could tell the bear never touched any of the baits, though one afternoon I did find a dead turkey vulture sprawled in the bushes like a discarded parasol.

As if in compensation for denying himself the baits, the bear took to rummaging through our garbage each night, disemboweling the green plastic bags with the alligator fasteners, gnawing cans and spreading a slick coat of mashed vegetable matter, grease and undifferentiated slime over the porch. Gesh saw this as a provocation. He spent the better part of an afternoon rigging up a battery-powered light system that would illuminate the bewildered scavenger’s shaggy nighttime form just long enough to spell his doom. Pissed off, grim, wrapped in an old poncho and chain-smoking joints, Gesh sat up with the shotgun, waiting for the bear to signal his appearance with the fatal clank of can or bottle. When dawn spread her rosy fingers over the eastern sky, garbage was spread over the floorboards of the porch as usual, and Gesh was staring numbly down the barrel of his gun. “Never heard a thing,” he said, his voice trailing off.

Then, in a succession of lightning raids, the bear consumed three quarts of motor oil, dragged a section of barbed-wire fence half a mile into the woods, punctured two more lengths of PVC pipe and knocked out the back window of the cabin to get at a case of apricot preserves (which he ate, shards of glass and all, without apparent harm). This time he’d gone too far: it was obvious that he had to be dealt with, and dealt with severely. We began to carry weapons when we made our rounds.

It was a clear, baking, Sonoran-desert sort of morning when I ambled through Julie Andrews’s Meadow (now brown as the pampas) on my way to our most remote and least propitious growing area. The plants in the meadow were rigid, verdant and strong, two and a half or three feet high already, and I stopped a minute to admire them. I had a hoe slung over my shoulder, and the.357 magnum pistol tucked in my belt. The hoe was for weeding the sorry marijuana patch we’d dubbed “Duke’s Heel,” in ironic acknowledgment of George Deukmejian, the fanatical attorney general of the state of California, who’d been known to direct paratroop assaults on isolated marijuana farms and bring in a TV crew to record them; the pistol was for the bear. If I spotted him, I would shoot him. Or at least attempt to.

As I gave the springy serrate leaves a final proprietary pat and headed off across the meadow, I thought how incongruous it all was, how primitive, how much an atavism to go gunning for bear in an age when we couldn’t even recognize true dirt. From childhood I’d been taught to revere wildlife, to raise my voice against the multinational corporations, corrupt shepherds, reactionary presidents and robber barons who would strip, rape and pollute the land. I’d sat through ecology classes in high school, turned out for Save the Whale rallies and Tree People boosters and fired off letters to congressmen protesting offshore-drilling amendments. I deplored the slaughter of the bison and passenger pigeon alike, recoiled from the venality of those who draped themselves in ocelot or wore boots fashioned from the belly of the gavial. Who wouldn’t? But then it was easy to take a moral stance while munching an avocado-and-sprout sandwich in a carpeted apartment in New York or San Francisco. Now I was on the other side of the fence, now I was confronting nature at the root rather than lying back and reading about it. And at root, nature was dirty, anarchic, undisciplined, an enemy to progress and the American dream. Incongruous though it may have seemed, and though I was subscriber to the principles of the Sierra Club and a member of the Coyote Protective Society, I ambled across that field fingering the pistol and ready — no, seething — to kill.

Duke’s Heel consisted of forty stunted plants concealed beneath the canopy of two rugged old serpentine oaks. We’d planted here without much hope, breaking a crust of hardpan to dig the holes for the late-sprouters and withered backup plants Dowst had managed to tease into existence. I was planning to hack out the weeds, water and fertilize the plants, and check the deer fencing. But when I descended the back slope of the meadow, I saw immediately that something was wrong. For one thing, the fence was down, and as I drew closer I saw that an entire section of chicken wire had been accordioned, balled up as if under the pressure of some immense crushing weight. For another — and this was a shock — the ground was barren. Where before there had been the sweet succulent green of the struggling plants, now there was only dirt, yellow-brown and naked. I threw the hoe aside, drew the gun from my belt and ran headlong down the hill.

After the glare of the sun on the open field, the shade beneath the trees was disorienting, and I drew up short, breathing hard, my eyes raking the shadows. A bear, I thought, and the thought was numbing: I’m going to shoot a bear. No rabbit, no squirrel, no soft-eyed defenseless doe: a bear. Tooth, sinew and muscle, four hundred pounds of raging hirsute flesh, claws the size of fingers, jaws that could deracinate limbs and pulverize bone. Standing there in the penumbra of the tree, blinking back panic and squinting till my eyes began to tear, I suddenly recalled a story I’d read as a boy in True or Outdoor Life or some such place: a grizzly had attacked an Aleut guide and raked his face off— eyes, nose, lips, teeth — and the Indian had crawled twenty miles with his hamburger features and panicked an entire village. Then he died.

My hand quaked as I held the gun out before me. It was quiet, the only sound a distant hum of insects and the chock-chock-chock of some hidden bird. Aside from a scattering of leaves, there was no trace of the plantlings we’d put in the ground here — every last one had been uprooted. I looked closer and recognized the now familiar paddlelike tracks in the dirt. And then, with a start, I realized that I was not alone in the clearing beneath the trees.

For some seconds I’d been filtering out a steady and distinctive background noise — a low wheezing ripple and snort of air, an asthmatic sound, like the hiss of a vacuum cleaner with the slightest obstruction in the wand. Now the sound began to register, and I traced it to a tangle of branch and weed at the far perimeter of the growing area, no more than thirty feet away. In that moment I experienced a revelation that slammed at my knees and swabbed my throat dry: the bear was in that tangle. Not only was he in there, but he was asleep, and what I’d been hearing was the steady sibilant rise and fall of his snores. But why, I asked myself, would this canny night-raider leave himself wide open to the hurts of the world, laid out like a wino at the very scene of the crime — and in broad daylight?

The answer came like a fanfare: he was stoned, that’s why. Obliterated, wasted, kayoed, down for the count, his great bruin’s belly swollen with the remains of forty pot plants. I listened to his breathing, deep and restful, insuck and outflap: yes, the bear was in there all right, sleeping off a monumental high, snoring as contentedly as if he’d just toddled off to his den for a long winter’s nap.

This was it, I thought, this was my chance. I could empty the magazine and fling myself into the highest branches of the tree before he knew what hit him. I scrutinized the welter of leaves with the intensity of a hit man, probing for a target. There, that was the cracked black sole of his foot, wasn’t it? Yes! And there, buried in the vegetation, the immense mottled hulk of him, like a heap of moldy carpet someone had scraped from the floor of a flooded basement. I steadied the pistol with my left hand, as Vogelsang had demonstrated, and took aim.

A big bloated second ticked by, the bear snoring, my finger clutching the trigger as if it were my pass to the realms of glory. I remembered the scoutmaster, the bull’s-eye target perforated with.22 holes, Vogelsang and the shotgun. But this was not the shotgun, this was the pistol, and its use required skill and concentration. What if I missed? Or merely wounded him? And if I killed him, then what? Would I bury him? Skin him and eat him? Leave him for the maggots? I lowered the gun. You’d have to be heartless, a degenerate blood-crazed butcher, to shoot a sleeping bear. There he lay in all his splendor, denizen of slope and glade, hibernator, bee-keeper, omnivore, symbol of the wild and born free: who was I to take his life? Perhaps I could simply fire in the air and scare him off. But that left open the possibility that instead I’d scare him into springing up and removing my face. I thought of slinking away, going for Gesh and Phil and the shotgun, sharing the danger and the terrible responsibility both. But no. There was no time for that. The bear was raiding our crops, destroying everything we’d worked and planned for, threatening the very success of the project itself. I raised the gun. Kill! a voice shrieked in my ear. Kill!

At that moment, my options were suddenly reduced to zero. For the bear, perhaps sensing on some deep instinctual level that he was half a step from eternity, awoke, and poked his huge grizzled snout from the bushes. He was lying on his side, raising his head wearily, like a commuter roused by the first buzz of the alarm clock. For an instant we regarded each other in bewilderment. His great chocolate eyes were striated with red veins, marijuana leaves hung from his drooping jaw, and his odor — the feculent, rancid, working stench of him — enveloped me. I was stunned. Terrified. Entranced.

The bear broke the spell. He rolled to his feet like an old sow shaking up from the dust, a sapling snapped under the weight of him and I fired. BOOM! The report of the gun was loud as a howitzer blast. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! I fired again and again, backing away simultaneously, all my circuits open wide.

I missed.

When the smoke cleared, the bear was standing there precisely as he had been an instant earlier, but now his eyes were seized with intimations of mortality. He gave me one quick dumbfounded look, as if to say “You’re really serious about all this, aren’t you?” and then he was gone.

He took the back fence with him, and cleared a path through the scrub that would have accommodated Clyde Beatty’s elephants. For a long while I could hear him crashing through the brush, and I listened till the sound was absorbed in the hum of the insects and the bored, quotidian chock-chock-chock of the hidden bird.

Chapter 2

Even before I could think to set down the sack of German beer, cold cuts and cannolis tucked under my arm, I’d hit every light-switch in the place, flicked on the air conditioner, tuned the TV to some cretinous game show and dropped the stylus on Carmina Burana at killing volume. This was living. I felt like Stanley emerged from the jungle, Zeus hurling thunderbolts; I felt liberated, triumphant, omnipotent. Machines hummed and clicked at my command, breezes blew and trumpets rang out. I was home.

Gesh followed me up the stairs like a page, his arms laden with wine, kaiser rolls, grapes, olives, anchovies, taco chips, Dijon mustard and artichoke hearts. It was two p.m., Friday, the start of the Fourth of July weekend, and we were a hundred and fifty miles from the heat, dust and disrepair of the summer camp. I was overjoyed. Save for a trip to Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply in Santa Rosa, this was the first time I’d left Willits in four months. Four months: I could hardly believe it. The world had gone on, governments rising and falling, economic indicators in a tailspin, people scheming, dying, erecting shopping centers and committing acts of heroism and depravity, and all the while I’d been sitting on my ass in the hinterlands, contracting poison oak and facing down rednecks and bears. But now, now at long last, sacrifice would have its reward: Gesh and I were on a three-day furlough, horny and wild and crotchsore as drovers descending on Abilene.

Phil, who had experienced some measure of relief in Tahoe the previous weekend, had reluctantly agreed to stay behind and tend the plants. “I can handle it,” he said, and then, playing on our fears, “so long as Sapers stays where he belongs and the bear doesn’t come poking around again.” We scarcely heard him. After sixteen weeks of abstinence — sixteen weeks during which we leered at sheep, slavered over farm girls in the two-hundred-pound class and built elaborate fantasies around the whores of Rio — we were strung just as tightly as the horniest zit-faced adolescent. Bears, cops, commandos, insolvency, failure, ignominy and incarceration: none of it mattered. Our eyes were glazed with romance, we were already lifting cocktails in lush gleaming bars full of secretaries, cosmeticians, poetesses and lutanists, the field of our perception narrowed to a single sharp focus. For the present, we had one concern and one concern only: women.

Gesh made the sandwiches while I showered and shaved. Then, while he was anointing himself, I made a few phone calls, hoping to connect with one of the girls I’d dated sporadically over the past year or so. I was disappointed. Amy and Marcia, I learned, had married, and I offered them my feeble congratulations. Giselle was in France, Corinne had joined the army, and Annie was dead. When Annie’s phone didn’t answer, I called her sister, who erupted in sobs at the mention of her name. It was a shock. Annie, declaimer of poetry, danseuse, cat-lover, Annie of the quick smile and athletic legs, had been laid low, cut down by a Coup de Ville as she crossed Market Street on her Moped. All I’d wanted was the fleeting comfort of pressing my flesh to hers — all I’d wanted was love — and instead I’d been given a whiff of the grave. O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,/O Priestess in the vaults of Death …

“Bummer,” Gesh said, flailing his hair with a plastic brush.

I didn’t mean to be insensitive, but I couldn’t have agreed more: it was an inauspicious beginning, and the shock of it dampened my mood as automatically as would the news of an earthquake in Cincinnati or the outbreak of the Third World War. Gesh sat in the corner, a beer between his legs, subdued, watching me. What could I say? It was too bad, a shame and a pity and all that. Still, we were off the farm, and that alone was enough to ignite us again. Before long we were dribbling beer down our chins and bellowing along with Orff. We ate the sandwiches, drank the beer, graduated from Orff to the Stranglers, the Rude Boys and finally the Armageddon Sisters, and then flung ourselves out the door.

Our first stop was the Mexican laundry, where we deposited eight swollen sacks of towels, T-shirts and undershorts in varying stages of fermentation and stained with paint, grease, sweat, tomato paste, Rose’s Lime Juice and the essence of bear. Next we drove up to Ashbury Heights to visit one of Gesh’s acquaintances, a recreational pharmacologist who occupied the dingy servants’ quarters of a twenty-room Edwardian mansion he shared with a lawyer and his wife, a lesbian couple, three Iranian students and an out-of-work carpenter. We passed through an iron gate, ascended marble steps. Gesh knocked.

There was a cacophony of canine yelps and snarls, a scrambling of paw and toenail against the inner door and then the irascible tones of a distant voice: “Coming. Coming.” A moment later, a short angry character with a buzzhead haircut simultaneously swung back the door and kicked savagely at a pair of trembling Gordon setters. “Yeah?” he said, pinning us with a malevolent look.

“Rudy in?” Gesh said.

Without a word, Buzzhead simply turned and walked off into the shadows, leaving the door wide open and the skittish dogs shivering at the doorframe. I followed Gesh, pulling the door shut behind me, the wet noses of the dogs poking at my hands as we passed through a crepuscular entrance hall jagged with furniture — highboys, lowboys, armoires, sideboards. The entrance hall gave onto a drawing room heaped with boxes of clothes and books and smelling of cat litter. “This way,” Gesh said, and we followed a paneled corridor past another disused room, descended a flight of stairs and pushed through a curtain into a small apartment.

There was an odor of onions, tobacco, rubbing alcohol. In the corner, stretched out on a bare mattress and spotlighted in the glow of a tensor lamp, a man with plaited hair held a paperback book to his face. Aside from the mattress, which lay on the floor, and a number of milk crates ranged against the wall and stuffed with books, shoes, clothing and newspapers, the only furniture in the room was a safe the size of a refrigerator. “Hey,” the man said as we entered the room, and then he sprang up from the bed like a predator, snarling, “Get out, get out, you fucking beasts!”

He was referring to the dogs.

“Goddammit,” he muttered, and there was real vehemence in his tone. “Stinking hairy bastards.” Then he grabbed Gesh’s hand and his face erupted in a grin. “Gesh!” he boomed. “How the fuck are you?”

Gesh said he had no complaints, and then nodded at me. “Rudy,” he said, “Felix.” I opted for the soul shake, but Rudy came straight on and twisted my hand around as if it were a salami on a string. Then he turned abruptly, padded to the safe and began spinning the tumblers. “So,” he shouted over his shoulder, “you hear anything from Ziggy?”

Gesh responded to this — no, he hadn’t heard from Ziggy but someone had told him he was waiting tables in Lahaina — while I studied Rudy. Aside from one or two of the pus-eyed reprobates clutching bottles in doorways off Mission Street, Rudy was the oddest, unhealthiest, most unsavory-looking character I’d laid eyes on in years. He was barefoot, wearing a torn pair of Jockey shorts and a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a NUKE THE WHALES button appended to the shoulder; his bare legs were hairless, the skin more yellow than white. His hair was plaited in tight cornrows that alternated with furrows of pink scalp as if his head were the blueprint for a maze, he was chinless and skinny as a concentration camp survivor, his nose was shoved up into his face and his eyes were too big for their sockets, stretching the lids like beer bellies poking out from beneath shrunken T-shirts.

When the safe swung open, I saw pharmaceutical scales, bags of mannitol and cocaine, plastic tear-sheets of Mandrax stacked like corrugated cardboard, a big food-storage Baggie full of twenties wound tight as pencils and secured with rubber bands. Rudy extracted a miniature medicine vial from the safe, and then fished around in one of the milk baskets for a bag of pot and a package of cigarette papers. For the next half hour we sat cross-legged on the floor beneath posters of John Lennon, Margaret Thatcher and the Pope, and deposited various substances in our oral and nasal cavities while we shammed the roles of host and guest. The conversation consisted of ejaculations like “Um, yeah, that’s good,” and a continuing exchange between Rudy and Gesh that invariably began with one or the other of them saying “What do you hear from X lately?” After a while they seemed to run out of mutual acquaintances and a paralyzing silence fell over the room. This was the signal for Gesh and me to rise and lay out half our weekend’s allowance — painstakingly hoarded against our eight-dollars-per-diem salary — for two grams of coke and fifteen Quaaludes. Then we wished Rudy well and went out to tear the town apart.

It was six o’clock. We drove to North Beach, parked, and ambled down the street in a blaze of neon. I was feeling good, the pavement clicking beneath my heels, windows struck with light, people on the street, music in the air. After the months of exile, after the countless deadening hours that weighed on us like some wasting disease, this was exhilarating, a rush, and even the clash of traffic and the stink of exhaust gladdened my heart. I’d been around the world with Magellan, eaten my own shoes and seen the worst, and now I was home again. When Gesh said, “Let’s have a cocktail,” I was already dancing in the street.

The first place we stepped into featured thundering rock and roll and naked women grunting in a mud pit. We had two stingers and one quack apiece, and perked ourselves up in the men’s room with a line of coke. I stood with my back to the bar, propped on my elbows, and watched the artificial mud cling to the nipples and moisten the crevices of the wrestling women. My teeth were on edge, and I found myself leaning into Gesh and shouting nonstop over the music as the coke worked on the verbal centers of my brain. This was good, I thought, this was what I wanted: excitement, cheap and loud. I felt expansive, generous, witty and invulnerable.

Twenty minutes later, as the effect of the coke waned and the methaqualone began to pour sand in my joints, I waxed philosophical. What was this need, I mused, for chemical oblivion? The world was full of drunks, junkies, kat-chewers and ether-sniffers. Kids stuck their heads in buckets of paint thinner, bears bloated on fermented berries, cats rolled in catnip. And here I was, stoned and getting stoneder, on holiday from my new vocation — itself an indictment — and watching a pair of big-titted women slog around in a tub of artificial mud. Understanding hit me like a truck: I was a degenerate. I was no part-time scholar and contractor on the rebound from the recession, I was a dope fiend and a dope dealer, saboteur of lives and minds, a gutless profit-monger and mammon-worshipper. Jerpbak had been right to single me out and pin me to the wall: I was dangerous, subversive. Suddenly I felt depressed, filled to the neck with sadness like a carafe with bad wine.

I sipped glumly at my drink and watched as one woman straddled the other, pinning an arm behind her back and mounting her rodeo-style. Then Gesh emerged from the men’s room, pushed his way through the crowd at the bar, and slipped me the vial of cocaine. I took it, retired to a stall in the men’s and did two quick toots. Within moments, I felt better. Immeasurably better. I was no archfiend, no blighter of lives or robber baron: I was just a regular guy, out on the town, feeling good, an entrepreneur providing a service for society. That’s all. No harm. I ground my teeth and fluffed my hair in the mirror, the exhilaration returning. I was handsome, healthy, soon-to-be-rich, and I was sowing some oats. Big deal. When I shoved in beside Gesh at the bar, a murmur of appreciation rose from the patrons, and I turned to see that the mounted woman was forcing her antagonist’s face into the mire while simultaneously slapping her flank like a jockey coming off the wire.

The next place had a pool table and smelled of hot grease. Two black dudes in purple pants and a silver-haired character in a suit sat at the bar. A frazzled blonde was shooting pool, the TV was tuned to a sitcom and a web of falsetto voices crooned from the jukebox over a thumping disco beat. Gesh went to the men’s room. I ordered beers and pressed two quarters to the rail of the pool table. The blonde never even glanced up.

When she finished, I racked for eight ball and she broke with a shattering crash that sent a pair of low balls leaping for the pockets. I never even got to shoot. Gesh was next. She ran six and then missed. Gesh came back with a run of five before blowing an easy setup in the corner pocket. She missed. He missed. Then she sank the two remaining balls and made a neat cross-table cut on the eight to win it. “Nice shot,” Gesh said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Tanqueray martini,” she said. “Straight up.”

Gesh introduced himself.

“Chinowa,” she said, extending her hand.

“And this is Felix.”

She turned to me, her mouth a pout of concentration, eyes like ceramics. “Rack ’em up.”

We played her for the next hour or so, alternating games, and she never relinquished the table. She never seemed to lose control, no matter how much she drank, the cuestick flicking cleanly through the nest of her fingers as if it were tapped into her nervous system. Gesh and I, on the other hand, grew progressively weaker as the alcohol, in combination with the methaqualone, began to affect our coordination. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to enjoy humiliating us, neatly cracking down ball after ball, executing tricky bank shots and wicked side-pocket cuts, while we lurched around the table, spilling beer and fumbling for the chalk.

We hung on. I don’t know why — for her sake, I guess. I had begun to develop a deep and abiding appreciation of the way her calves flexed as she leaned over the table, the percussive clack of her heels dancing a cha-cha in my head. My third beer went down like water. I swallowed another Quaalude — for poise — and began to construct a scenario for the evening. Chinowa, who with her strong fingers and sure stick was obviously a bundle of seething erotic appetites, would phone her tall lusty roommate, the four of us would hit a few clubs and then retire to my apartment for foreplay and afterplay. Gesh leaned over a giveaway shot on the eight ball, his eyes dulled, tongue pinned in the corner of his mouth, and I knew he was envisioning a similar scenario. He would beat her with a flick of his wrist, beat her finally and authoritatively, and we could all relax and get out of this dump. As the Fates would have it, however, he miscued, the white ball skewing off impotently to kiss the far cushion and then perversely dribble back to the center of the table. Chinowa’s laugh was sharp and disdainful. She bent over the eight ball and slammed it into the pocket as if she were hitting a punching bag.

We were reacting to this, tugging at our beards and fumbling for the necks of our beer bottles, when a short lilting whistle — the tinkle of a door chime, one note up and one down — penetrated the miasma of castrato “baby-baby” emanating from the jukebox. Slowly, like turtles cooking in the sun, we rotated our heads in the direction of the bar. Mr. Silverhair had pushed himself up from the barstool and stood smoothing his locks for a moment, and then, without a backward glance, strode purposefully out the door. Our heads swiveled back to Chinowa, who at the first fluttering note had straightened up as if she’d been slapped, dropping the cuestick to the floor with a clatter. Now she snatched her purse from a stool at the bar and hurried out the door, the clack-clack-clack of her heels echoing like gunshots in the sudden dramatic silence between songs.

“She wasn’t worth a shit anyway,” Gesh said, cramming the nether end of a three-pound super-chicken burrito into his mouth. We were outside, on the street, holding take-out burritos the size of skeins of yarn. “Yeah,” I said, wiping guacamole from my face and fighting to talk, chew and maintain my balance all at the same time, “and besides, it’s too early to get pinned down for the night yet.” It was nine o’clock. Gesh examined his watch carefully, as if it could not only tell him the time but plot the progress of every available female in town to boot. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, we got to get to these clubs, man, and start dancing.”

It was a noble sentiment, nobly expressed. Unfortunately, as he formed the syllables of the final word, a word that connotes motion and grace, he lost his balance and staggered back against the window of a Chinese herbalist’s shop. The shop was dark, the window resilient. The burrito, however, was not so resilient. It dropped from his hand and split open like a rotten banana. On his shoes. The shoes, and the cuffs of both pant legs, were smeared with a méeAlange of salsa, chicken, green chilis, sour cream, beans, onions, guacamole and rice. Gesh merely stared down at his feet, as he’d stared a moment earlier at his watch, a look of dim incomprehension creasing his features. He could have been the village idiot, puzzling over his intertwined shoelaces. A motorcycle snarled down the street, someone shouted from a second-story window. Finally Gesh waved his hand in a vague gesture of dismissal and said “Fuck it,” his voice thick with retardation.

The events of the remainder of that evening — and especially their sequence — were never quite clear to me. But I can say with assurance that we drifted in and out of a number of clubs that featured heavy metal, new wave disco, punk, blues, blue-grass, reggae and bossa nova, and that we lurched across various congested dance floors with various women and made lewd, drunken proposals to all of them. Our breath was foul, our legs unsteady. We slammed into doorposts, stepped on people’s feet, were twice refused service. At one point, I recall, Gesh took umbrage at the appearance of a massive, iron-pumping, head-cracking bouncer at a tidy little club in which everyone was neatly dressed and behaving himself. “Fucker looks like a neutered cat,” Gesh growled, jabbing his finger in the direction of a young giant who lounged watchfully in the corner, his arms folded against a chest so muscle-inflated he might have been wearing a lifejacket.

Suddenly I was sober. “Are you crazy?” I said. “That guy’s arms alone are bigger than my entire body.”

Gesh’s eyes were glazed, his face hard. In the candlelight, the scar that split his eyebrow had a dull sheen to it, like the white of a hard-boiled egg. For answer, he merely shrugged. I knew Gesh well enough to appreciate his volatility — I had only to think of his confrontations with Vogelsang, his impatience with Dowst, the rage that consumed him when the pump broke down or the Jeep failed to start — and I could see that something had set him off, could see that he was looking for trouble. “Come on,” I said, “this place isn’t for us. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Gesh’s gaze was fixed on the bouncer. For his part, the bouncer merely stood there, his eyes sweeping the room contemptuously. In front, elevated above a mass of straight-backed chairs and glossy cocktail tables, a folksinger perched on a stool and did early-sixties stuff about harmony and the brotherhood of man. “Cabbagehead,” Gesh muttered, still glaring at the bouncer. “Sink licker.” I tried to restrain him, but he brushed me aside. I watched as he made his way to the bar, ordered a triple créeGme de menthe — it came in a big water glass — cakewalked past the bouncer like a harmless high-spirited fraternity guy out on a date, then spun round and neatly upended the glass on the bouncer’s head.

“Sorry,” Gesh said with a sick grin.

For one stunned second the bouncer held himself in check — Is this guy serious? Should I be angry? — before hurling himself forward like a steel wrecker’s ball. I remember thinking, as the viscous green slop congealed the bouncer’s hair and startled his shirt, that Gesh had erred irretrievably, that we’d shortly be confronted by the police, and that I’d once again find myself digging deep for bail money. But Gesh surprised me. Stoned, drunk, and perverse as he was, he’d planned his move well—“Just counting coup,” he later explained — and at the moment of truth, with exquisite timing, jammed a glossy cocktail table into the behemoth’s knees. Reeking of mint, the big man took a fall, spewing drinks and crushing glass, wood and Lucite beneath him. The diversion gave Gesh — and me — time to dodge out the door, duck round the corner and stumble the length of a three-block alley like handicapped sprinters trying out for the Special Olympics. We finally pulled up behind an overflowing dumpster to catch our breath and erupt in nervous, triumphant, moronic giggles. This was silly, juvenile, undignified and ultimately unfulfilling, the sort of thing you did when you were sixteen. It was all that, but somehow it was hilarious, too.

In mid-laugh, as if it were a natural extension of the joke, Gesh suddenly doubled over to evacuate the contents of his stomach. I listened to his wet heaving gasps — the dying throes of a hero with a sword twisted in his gut — and began to feel queasy myself. “The smug son of a bitch,” he choked, and then gagged again. When he was finished, he straightened up, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and said, “What next?”

It was one-fifteen. We’d gone through the cocaine and all but six of the Quaaludes. The night had turned cold, and a dank insidious fog had begun to feather its way through the streets, smoothing angles, blurring distinctions. We headed away from Broadway, looking for a place I knew — or thought I knew — where we could have a nightcap.

I was feeling enervated, as if I’d been walking forever, part of a commando raid in Bataan that didn’t quite come off, a misguided explorer hoofing it back to civilization. The night had been a disappointment, there was no doubt about it. We’d left the apartment in high spirits, needful, aching with desire, and we’d struck out. Bombed. Wound up empty-handed and addle-brained, with a bad taste in our mouths. The amazing thing is that we’d expected anything different — this was the way it always was and always would be, world without consummation, amen.

In a way, it was like fishing. Once a year, having forgotten how insufferable it is, I would go fishing. A day would come when I would awaken to think of hooks, lines, sinkers, the mysteries of the deep, and then of broiled halibut or rock cod in black bean sauce. Like Ishmael too long ashore, I would hurry down to the marina, snuffing the salt air. Then I’d fork over thirty-five bucks to the charter-boat captain, stand in a knot of drunken sportsmen and vomit over the rail for six hours. Fish? By the end of the day I couldn’t imagine that that pounding pitching hell of an ocean was anything but the lifeless desert it seemed.

I was operating on this level of unhope when we pushed through the door of the bar I’d been looking for, only to find that this was a different place altogether. Strangers, clots of them, stared up at us — strangers who didn’t give a shit if I lived or died or ever again experienced love in all my fruitless wandering years on earth. Candles glowed ’on rough-hewn tables, smoke rose like mustard gas from a hundred cigarettes, the jukebox rattled with slash-’em/tear-’em rock and roll. I saw long noses, drawn canine faces, earrings, nose rings, blue hair, orange hair. No one was smiling.

“Uh, listen,” I said, taking Gesh by the arm, “I don’t think this is the right place.”

Gesh didn’t look overconcerned. He merely shrugged, and was about to advance on the bar when a muscular voice cut through the jukebox frenzy to shout out our names: “Gesh! Felix! How the fuck you doing?”

It was Rudy. Chinless, noseless, skin the color of ripe grapefruit. He was standing at the bar with a guy so short and deformed he could have been a chimpanzee dressed up for the occasion. “Hey!” Rudy shouted, ushering us forward, “I’d like you to meet my friend Raul.”

Raul was about four and a half feet tall, and there was something seriously wrong with his shoulders and torso. His shoulders were massive — big as a linebacker’s — and swelled out in a lump at the base of his head. He had no neck, and his chest and abdomen were foreshortened, so that he looked as if he’d been compressed vertically. I shook his hand and nodded at the crazed glint in his black eyes.

“And this,” Rudy was saying, “is Jones.” I now saw that Raul was flanked by a guy about thirty, a cool character with short hair combed straight up and back and wearing a tie the width of a tape measure. He nodded, and then took my hand perfunctorily. “My friends call me Bud,” he said.

“Hey, what you drinking?” Rudy shouted, and then asked where all the women were. “What,” he said, “did you strike out? Yeah?” He handed me an Irish coffee. “Don’t worry about it, man — me and Raul and Jonesie are on our way to this place where there’s some real action — right, Raul? — and you guys are welcome to come along if you want.”

Jones? Where had I heard that name before? Farmer Jones, Casey Jones, BoJo Jones. I beat on the brat, screamed the jukebox, I beat on the brat,/With a baseball bat. “Why not?” I said.

Outside, the fog had thickened. Cars vanished, parking meters were invisible at a range of ten feet, the light from storefronts was so diffuse it could have been spread with a butter knife. The five of us scraped out the door and shuffled down an alley, then crossed a street I didn’t recognize. Someone lit a joint and handed it to me. We walked on, our voices pitched low. Nobody said much.

If I was disoriented earlier, I was totally lost now — at first I thought we were headed in the direction of Chinatown, but with the fog and the various turnings I was no longer sure. “A block more,” Rudy said as we swung into a street as softly lit as a watercolor. I saw red neon off to my left, a sign winking on and off, but the fog was so dense I couldn’t make out the lettering. Then Jones’s voice, disembodied, was speaking somewhere behind me: “This is my street, man — see you tomorrow, Rude.”

“Hey Jonesie”—Raul’s voice—“what’s the matter? No lead in your pencil?”

“Tired, man. Hey, good to meet you,” Jones said, just a shadow now. “Ciao.”

We walked on. I glanced up and saw that the streetlights were truncated, dissolved in cloud, earth and sky become one. “You know, that Jones is a real pussy,” Raul said, and Rudy sniggered. I realized at that moment that I liked Rudy about as much as I liked snakes or trunk murderers, and that I liked his hunchbacked friend even less. And Jones — Jones was one of ten thousand people you meet casually and will never lay eyes on again, but still there was something about him that unsettled me. It was the name, I guess. Or the cool, faintly ironic look of appraisal he’d given me as we were introduced.

Suddenly I felt very weary of the whole business. Everything — Rudy and Raul, the dream of the summer camp, the fog, the hour, the city, my own lust-ridden, drugged and exhausted body — was shit. I wanted to go home to bed, but I didn’t. I kept walking, listening to the mesmeric scrape of our footsteps on the wet pavement. Halfway down the block, as if to let me know he was still there and functioning, however minimally, Gesh pressed something into my hand. It was the stub of the joint we’d been smoking, cold and long dead. I flung it away. A moment later we reached the end of the block and crowded into the doorway of what looked to be a deserted storefront. Raul knocked.

“Yeah?” came a voice from within.

“It’s me, Raul. I brought some friends.”

There was the sound of a bolt sliding back. Fog closed in on us like the breath of a beast. “What is this place, anyway?” Gesh said.

The door opened on a dimly lit interior: bare linoleum floor, bare white fluorescent tubes, two graffiti-scrawled folding chairs leaning forlornly against the back wall. We shuffled in, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. I had no idea what to expect — neither Rudy nor Raul would say anything other than “It’s a trip,” and “You’re really going to dig this”—and found myself suppressing an urge to whistle as Raul closed the door behind us.

Inside, to the left of the door and invisible from the street, stood a makeshift desk — a slab of plywood set across the seats of four folding chairs. A man in suspenders and a dirty Toms & Jerry T-shirt was easing himself down behind the desk as we entered. He said nothing, merely glanced up at us without interest. A calendar hung crookedly on the wall behind him, open for some obscure and aggravating reason to November. The man’s face was inflamed with some genetic skin disorder, corrugated with angry red lumps as if he’d blundered into a beehive, and strands of lank hair descended from his balding crown to his shoulders. A cigar box, a copy of The Wall Street Journal and a nightstick lay on the desk before him as if they’d been designed to complement one another. I’d expected a party, an after-hours club, a sleazy apartment with a couple of girls. But this? What was this?

The man — host, proprietor, whatever he was — looked bored. He pushed the hair out of his face and gestured at the blank wall that ran half the length of the room — plasterboard, painted white and already gray with grime, a cheap addition. I was puzzled. Storage room? Office? Then I noticed the holes. Holes punched at random in the flat smooth plasterboard face. There must have been ten or twelve of them, none higher than waist-level and all about two and a half inches in diameter.

“Ten bucks a pop,” the man said.

Enlightenment came more quickly to Gesh than me. “You mean … you mean we stick our … and somebody …?” It was as if he’d asked the waiter at Ma Maison what the silverware was for. The man behind the desk simply stared at him. “Shit,” Gesh laughed, “and we don’t even know who’s back there, right? Be it man or beast.”

We all swiveled our heads, even the proprietor, to contemplate the silent inanimate face of the wall.

“Who gives a shit?” Raul said, his eyes pools of oil. “What you going to do, go home and jerk off?”

I was stunned. This was crude, this was obscene, the ultimate in depravity, moral turpitude and plain bad taste. Talk about the zipless fuck, this was real anonymity, cold and soulless as an execution. I was repelled. But as I watched Raul, Rudy and Gesh count out their money, I began to see the perverse allure of it too. Dear Mom, don’t try to find me or anything but I’m writing to tell you I’m all right and I’ve got a steady job and plenty to eat. I stepped up to the desk and gave Tom-&-Jerry a ten-dollar bill.

“Pick your hole,” he said, handing me a ticket stub.

“What’s this?” I said.

“This place is hetero, right?” Gesh’s voice was slow. He was already standing before the wall, fumbling with his zipper.

No one answered him.

“The ticket goes in the hole, pal,” Tom-&-Jerry said. And then his face changed expression for the first time, the hint of a grin lifting his lip a millimeter or two. “Like at the movies.”

I moved to the far end of the wall, feeling foolish, feeling ashamed and naked, feeling stoned. The hole was neatly cut, edges smoothed, but it was encircled by a corona of dirt and some sad joker had scrawled Abandon hope, all ye who enter here just above it. What is lust? I thought, dropping the ticket into the aperture. What is flesh? What is mind? I unfastened my zipper, found that I had an erection, and penetrated the wall. Gesh was laughing, Rudy concentrating. Beside me, pressed to the wall like a penitent, Raul moaned softly, his features bloated with rapture. I could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights, sadness crushed me like a fist and someone — something — took hold of me with a grip as moist and gentle as love.

Chapter 3

Grim, silent, dehydrated and disappointed, hemmed in by eight bags of clean laundry, miscellaneous groceries and three coolers of ice, we passed under the great arching portals of the Golden Gate Bridge, skirted Sausalito and plunged into the blistering hellish heat of Route 101 North. We had six dollars left — for gas — the ravaged exhaust system screamed like a kamikaze coming on for the kill, and a cordon of semis — STAY BACK; DON’T TREAD ON ME; PETROCHEM LTD. — spewed diesel fumes in our faces. Gesh lit a cigarette. I flicked on the radio and got fire and brimstone, static, and Roy Rogers singing “Happy Trails.” We were on our way back to bondage.

The previous day — the Fourth — we’d awakened sometime after noon to a barrage of cherry bombs and the tat-a-tat-tat of firecrackers. Startled from concupiscent dreams, I thought at first that war had broken out, made the groping but inescapable connection between the hiss of Roman candles and the birth of the Republic, and then snatched desperately for the glass of water standing on the night table. If I could just manage to reach that glass, there was a chance I might survive; if not, I was doomed. Sun tore through the curtains like an avenging sword, the sky was sick with smog and the stink of sulfur hung on the air. Straining, my fingers trembling with alcoholic dyscrasia, monkeys shrieking and war drums thumping in my head, I managed to make contact with and knock over the glass, and I lay there gasping like some sea creature carried in with the tide and left to the merciless sun and the sharp probing beaks of the gulls. My eyes failed at that point and I dozed (dreams of staggering across the Atacama Desert, ears and nostrils full of sand, tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth), until I was jolted awake again by the next concussive report. There was nothing for it but to get up and drink a quart of orange juice and six cups of coffee.

Gesh was sitting at the kitchen table, calmly spooning up poached egg with ketchup and green chili sauce, when I stumbled into the room. I tilted my head under the faucet and drank till I could feel it coming up, then tossed the coffee pot on the stove and found a can of orange-juice concentrate in the freezer. Gesh cracked a beer and smoothed out the sports page. “So what’s on for today?” he said without glancing up.

As the block of orange juice sucked back from the can and dropped into the pitcher with a fecal plop, the ramifications of Gesh’s query hit me, and I realized with relief that he was no more inclined than I to dwell on the previous night’s debacle — spilled milk, water under the bridge and all that — but was looking instead, with courage and optimism, to the future. “There’s a cookout,” I said, and explained that I was planning to visit some friends, consume charred meat and watermelon, and lie creatively about my whereabouts over the course of the past four months. After that, there were the fireworks at Fisherman’s Wharf, and then I was going to check out Aorta’s band, the Nostrils, at a club on Haight Street.

Gesh scraped an English muffin and said he thought he’d pass on the cookout. He’d been thinking about getting cleaned up and going downtown around six for dinner and the fireworks.

When I got back at six-thirty, Gesh was just heading out the door. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that featured yellow parrots and blue palm trees, his hair was slicked down with water and he reeked of aftershave. “Great,” he said, too loudly. “I thought you weren’t going to show up. Listen”—he was drunk, excited, wound up about something—“can you give me a ride downtown?”

“Where to?”

He drew a crumpled bar napkin from his pocket, read off an address and then hustled me down the steps and into the car. “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to have to can the fireworks — if that’s all right.”

I shrugged, watching him. “Sure.”

It seemed that he’d wandered into a bar full of women that afternoon—“Incredible, Felix: all of them foxes and they must have outnumbered the guys three to one”—and had made a date with one of them for the evening. Her name was Yvette, she was tall and high-busted and wore a slit skirt. Gesh tapped his comb to the beat of the radio and rhapsodized about her all the way downtown. “See you later,” he said as I dropped him off, and he sauntered up the sidewalk like the romantic lead in a Broadway musical. Suddenly I felt depressed.

The fireworks went up and came down. Pop-pop. Bang. I watched them glumly, had a couple of greasy eggrolls and then drove over to the club where the Nostrils were playing. Three dollars at the door, a handstamp that showed two pig’s nostrils like a pair of bifocals, more earrings and pink hair. I picked a table near the stage, chain-drank tequila and tonic because I felt conspicuous—who is this joker sitting by himself, anyway? — and settled down to wait for the show to start.

An hour later the Nostrils stepped out on the darkened stage, tuned their instruments and blasted into a pulse-pounding version of “God Bless America” as the lights came up. Almost immediately people began slam dancing under the stage, and a couple of harried-looking waitresses in change aprons began to clear the tables out of the way. I got up, stood at the bar, and because service was slow, ordered two drinks at once.

The Nostrils were an all-girl band. The lead singer, who looked like Bela Lugosi in drag, played guitar and fronted the group, while Aorta, standing beside a co-backup vocalist so emaciated she could have stepped out of one of the photographs of Dachau, ululated weird falsetto chants over the buzzsaw guitar riffs. At the rear of the stage, huddled over their instruments like praying mantises, the bass player and drummer hammered away at tribal rhythms. The music went on, without change, for an hour. One song segued into another, and all were alike — or perhaps they were simply doing an extended version of a single song. I couldn’t tell. Then, in mid-beat, the music died so abruptly I thought the plug had been pulled, the lights faded and the dancers stopped slamming one another long enough to bellow incoherent threats through the sudden silence.

“Felix,” Aorta said, threading her way through the crowd. “Glad you could make it. Got the weekend off, huh? How’d you like us?”

I shook her hand, forever cold, and wondered how to respond to this effusive rush of communication. For Aorta, this was practically filibustering. “Gesh and I came down for the weekend,” I said.

“He here?” craning her neck to scan the crowd.

“No.” I took a sip of my drink, and then lied: “The music was hot.”

This was polite, and a neat conversational ploy as well, but Aorta didn’t have a chance to respond. A girl had appeared beside her, and through the sweat, runny mascara and streaked pancake makeup, I saw that she was the Lugosi impersonator. “Vena, this is Felix — he’s a friend of Vogelsang’s.”

Vena shot me a quick cool glance and then turned to Aorta. “You see who’s in the crowd tonight?”

Aorta, never one to let her emotions show, imperceptibly widened her eyes as Vena named a name that meant nothing to me. “Who’s that?” I said, and both women turned to look at me as if I’d just emerged from seventeen years in a Siberian gulag. From the gist of what passed between them, I gathered finally that he was a record producer.

“Let’s tear his head off,” Vena said, lighting a cigarette. “I think we ought to open with ’Burn Ward’ and then hit him with ’Pink and Dead.’“

“The music was hot the first set,” I said. “Anybody want a drink?” Elbows jostled me, voices shrieked with laughter, the ubiquitous jukebox started up with a roar. Vena was leaning into Aorta and shouting something in her ear. I tapped Aorta’s arm, and she looked up a moment to give me a glance as empty as the spaces between the star—Drink? I pantomimed. Do you want a drink? — and then she turned back to Vena. What could I say? I backed up to the bar and ordered another tequila. I don’t know what I’d expected from Aorta — sympathy, excitement, conversation, sex — but it was clear I wasn’t going to get it. Feeling sorry for myself, feeling as alone and friendless as a dieter at the feast of life, I went home to bed.

Now, buffeted by the chattering exhaust, billowing fumes and dust devils, I snuck a look at Gesh and saw that he hadn’t exactly been exhilarated and revivified by the holiday either. He was staring out the window of the car, moodily sucking at his cigarette, stolid and silent as a rock. “Some bust of a weekend,” I said, without taking my eyes from the road.

Gesh merely grunted, but there was an unfathomable depth of bitterness in that grunt, and though he hadn’t said anything about his date with Yvette, I understood that it, too, had been a bust. He morosely tossed his cigarette out the window and into a clump of grass beneath a FIRE HAZARD sign, and then turned to me. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.

“Yvette?”

Gesh flicked off the radio. “I wasn’t going to tell you this — it’s embarrassing — but the more I think about it, it’s so pathetic it’s funny.” He paused to reach behind him and fumble through the cooler for a splinter of ice. “You know, right from the beginning I thought there was something strange about her — it was too good to be true, right? Paradise. A bar full of beautiful women and all of them hot. At first I thought she might be a hooker or something, the way she came on to me in the afternoon, but she wasn’t. We did some kissing and groping at a booth in back and she didn’t say anything so I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else. ’I’ve got an appointment,’ she says. ’But I’m free tonight.’

“Okay. So I’m all pumped up and I go over to her apartment thinking I’ve got it made and she meets me at the door in a pair of jeans and a tube top. She looks fantastic, but there’s something about her that just doesn’t sit right. She’s big. Her shoulders are too wide. Then it hits me. But no, I think, that’s crazy, and I look at her again and she’s beautiful, stunning, like she just stepped off the cover of some women’s magazine.

“We have a drink. She starts coming on like a nymphomaniac but I’m holding back because of that funny feeling I had. I’m on top of her, I’m trying to get her top down and her hands are all over me. ’Listen,’ I say, ’I don’t know how to put this, I mean I hope you won’t be offended or anything, and this is probably insane, but could you tell me something — it’s really important to me.’

“She looks up at me, cold green eyes, eyes like the water under the Bay Bridge when you go fishing. ’What?’ she says in this tiny little voice.

“ ’Christ, I don’t know: this is crazy. But tell me, do you … I mean, you wouldn’t happen to have a penis by any chance?’

“Suddenly her eyes look like they’re sinking into her head, her pupils shriveling up, and she looks like she’s about to cry. And then she holds her hand up in front of my face, two fingers an inch apart. ’Yes,’ she whispers, and I jerk back as if my shirt’s on fire, ’but it’s only a little one.’ “

It must have been around seven when we hit the outskirts of Willits. The sun was dropping in the west and igniting the yellow grass of the hills, trees began to leap up along the road, and we passed a succession of neat little houses, as alike as pennies. Gesh was asleep, his head propped up on one arm and playing to and fro like a toy on a spring. I was thinking of the summer camp, of the plants flourishing in the stark sun, of the candy man who was going to buy the whole crop — cash up front — and of what I could do with a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, when I noticed that the car in front of me, a VW Bug of uncertain vintage, was behaving erratically. The car had slowed to a crawl and seemed to be listing to the right, as if the road had given way beneath it. As I drew closer and swung out to pass, I saw that the car was mottled with primer paint, bumper-blasted and rusted, and that the right front tire was flat to the rim.

I was already accelerating, humping up alongside to roar past and reduce the crippled Bug to a dot in the rearview mirror, when I turned to glance at the driver. What I saw was arresting: eyes you could fall into, a nimbus of black ringlets, the long, sculpted fingers and the open palm waving frantically for help. There was a desperation in that face, a needfulness that made my heart turn over. What she saw in return could hardly have inspired confidence — i.e., the battered Toyota, Gesh’s big lolling shaggy head, my intrusive eyes and sweat-plastered hair — but she waved all the harder. My foot fell back from the accelerator.

Having been raised in New York, I was accustomed to turning my back on all such appeals for aid from strangers. I routinely gave the stiff arm to panhandlers, slammed the door in the faces of Bible salesmen, Avon ladies and Girl Scouts, ground the receiver into its cradle at the hint of a solicitation and strenuously avoided all scenes of human misery and extremity. Ignore him, my mother would say of a man twisted like a burned root, the stubs of three crudely sharpened pencils clenched in his trembling fist. Don’t get involved, she’d hiss as a couple slugged it out over a carton of smashed eggs in the supermarket parking lot. But this was different. This was no half-crazed wino, wife-beater or terminal syphilitic — this was a flower, a beauty, a girl with a face that belonged to Amigoni’s Venus. She pulled over to the shoulder, her damaged wheel rim clanking like a cowbell, and I swung up just ahead of her.

She was agile, urgent, pouring from the car in a spill of flesh. Nike sneakers, satiny blue jogger’s shorts, a halter that left her shoulders and navel bare. Gesh had momentarily jolted awake as I rumbled up onto the shoulder, but now he drifted off again, snores ratchetting mechanically through his dried-up nostrils. I stepped out of the car.

“Oh, listen, thanks a lot,” she gasped, snatching for breath like a miler. “I’m really glad somebody stopped — have you got a jack?”

She was standing directly in front of me now, too close in her urgency, shoulders shrugged and palms spread in entreaty. Her mouth was wide, nose cut like an L, skin dark. Italian, I thought. Or Greek.

“Because I don’t know what happened to mine. I must’ve loaned it to somebody or something. Anyway, I’ve got a spare, and if you could just let me borrow your jack for a minute …”

I realized I’d been staring at her like a deaf-mute under sedation, and wrenched my face into a broad grin. “Sure, of course, no problem,” I barked, swinging round to work open the trunk.

“I hit something about three miles back,” she explained, peering into the trunk full of fast-food wrappers, rags, laundry, tools, cans of spray paint, torn tennis sneakers, and lurid paperbacks. “I figured I could limp into town, but then the rim started to go on me and all of a sudden the car was shaking like a roller coaster or something. Well, that was it. I started to get afraid for my pieces …”

I glanced up inquisitively, jack in hand.

“My pottery. I’m a potter. In Willits?” She took the jack from me as casually as if I were handing her a canapéeA at a cocktail party. “I’m right on Oak Street — it’s just a little place, Petra’s Pots. Between the real-estate office and the barbershop.”

A mobile home the size of a DC-7 rumbled by as she bent to maneuver the jack under the frame of the VW and give the jack handle two quick twists. I stood above her, watching the coils of hair play across her bare shoulders, and then peered through the window of her car and saw that the back seat was stacked with flats of ceramic mugs and matching cream-and-sugar sets. Larger pieces — they could have been bongs or samovars for all I knew — were wrapped in newspaper and wedged into the floor space on the passenger’s side. “Need any help?” I asked.

She was squatting beside the wheel now, fitting the cruciform wrench to the first of the wheel lugs, and she paused to glance up at me with a wide white smile: “No, thanks,” she said, “I’m not the helpless type.” Then she turned back to her work, and I watched her arms harden as she fought the lug. It wouldn’t give. She strained until her shoulders began to tremble, then rose to her feet for better purchase.

“You’re supposed to spit on your hands,” I said, and she laughed.

Then she attacked the recalcitrant lug once more, throwing her entire body into it, teeth gritted, eyes clenched, halter bursting. Nothing. I watched her smugly, greedily — it was my right and privilege to study this beautiful woman, this stranger, because my stopping to help had forced us into an intimacy of purpose, and I knew it would be only a matter of moments before she would turn to me for the muscle she lacked. “Wow,” she said finally, “that’s a bitch,” and she stood to wipe her hands on her shorts.

“Mind if I give it a try?” I said, arms folded across my chest.

“It must be frozen on,” she said. “You know, rusted,” but she was smiling softly, capitulating, and we both recognized that she was yielding ground, casting off the mantle of the woman warrior, if only for a moment.

As I bent to the wheel, I asked her if she was from Buffalo or Rochester, having detected a trace of vowel strangulation in her accent. “I was just curious,” I added. “I’ve got a lot of friends from up around there.”

“Chicago,” she said, flattening the a. “My name’s Petra, but I guess I already told you that.”

I smiled up at her, gripping the prongs of the lugwrench like Samson fastening on the jawbone of an ass, introduced myself in a gasp and gave the wrench a mighty jerk. Nothing happened. “Tight,” I grunted, flexing the muscles in my back.

“You from around here?” she said.

I jerked at the lug. It was immovable. With exaggerated care, as though the tool must be defective, I slipped the wrench from the lug and studied it.

“I mean,” she prompted, “you look familiar to me.”

“Oh,” I said, judiciously fitting the wrench to another lug and preparing to slip every disc, rupture every muscle, and herniate myself into the bargain with one murderous herculean thrust, “not really. We live in Palo Alto, actually. But we just”—I broke off to jerk savagely at the wrench—“but we just like come up on weekends to go, to go”—I was running sweat, furious, distracted, and I nearly shouted the final word—“fishing.”

“Looks like it’s really on there, huh?”

“No, no,” I said, bracing myself for another try, “don’t worry. It’s just”—again I heaved till I thought I could feel something give in my groin—“stuck, that’s all.”

It was at that moment, as if it had been choreographed by the Fates, as if all the hands of all the clocks that had measured time throughout history had been synchronized to mock that instant on that road on that day — it was then, when my guard was down and my passions piqued — that the CHP cruiser, revolving light aglow, glided silently up onto the shoulder behind us. I froze. Became a sculpture in living flesh: Man Changing Flat. Petra glanced up at the opaque window of the police car and put her hands to her hips.

The door of the car swung open and a glistening boot appeared. Then, six-two, one-eighty-five, as lean and tough as a strip of jerky and with every hair of his mustache clipped to regulation length, Officer Jerpbak emerged from the cruiser. He was carrying his summons book in one hand, and his mirror shades flashed malevolently. “What’s the problem here?”

“Nothing we can’t fix ourselves,” Petra said. Her voice had turned acid.

A pickup rattled by on the road, cloely tailed by a convertible that lurched into the outside lane with a blast of the throttle and then vanished in the distance. I straightened up — slowly, cautiously — still gripping the lugwrench and wondering what to do. Should I avert my face, throw my voice, drop the wrench and stroll casually back to the Toyota, start it up and drive off? The wrench weighed twelve tons, my heart was in my ears. Here he was, at long last, Jerpbak. Jerpbak the enforcer, Jerpbak the hound. In the flesh. “It’s just a flat tire, Officer,” I said, my voice hollow, withered, gone flat and out of key.

“Well,” said Jerpbak, ignoring me, “Miss Pandazopolos.” He sauntered up to the VW, put a foot on the bumper and thumbed through his summons book. “And her junk-wagon.”

“Oh, come on — get off my case, Jerpbak.” She flattened the final vowel until it trailed off in a bleat.

If to this point Jerpbak had seemed faintly amused, in the way of a nine-year-old with a bare wire and a pan of frogs, he turned abruptly serious. “In the car, lady,” he snapped. “I’m conducting a spot inspection of this vehicle right here and now.”

Petra fixed him with a stare of such intense, incendiary hatred I thought he’d burst into flame, and I realized with a thrill that she and I — that this fantastic, wide-mouthed, long-legged, dark-skinned, furious woman and I — had a bond in common. She opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jerpbak, impenetrable behind his shades, was already scribbling in his summons book, and she stalked round the car and slammed into the driver’s seat instead.

At this point, Jerpbak turned to me. “And who are you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

“I’m nobody. I mean I, uh, just stopped to help when I, uh—?”

“You a local?”

“Me? No, no. Just passing through, never been here before in my life. I live in San Jose. With my mother.”

“Funny,” Jerpbak said, scratching meditatively in the dirt with the toe of his boot, “you look familiar.” And then he hit me with the question that gave me nightmares: “Ever been to Tahoe?”

“Where?”

“You hard of hearing? Tahoe. Lake Tahoe.”

Shit, I thought, and I felt something give way, a piece of elastic frayed to the breaking point. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been there.” And then: “Look, what’s this all about, anyway? You charging me with being a good Samaritan or what?”

There was a long silence. Jerpbak’s glasses were like the eyes of a predacious insect, huge, soulless, unfathomable. Drums thundered in my head, my chest was exploding, a truck shot by with a climactic whoosh. “I don’t like you,” Jerpbak said finally. “I don’t like your shirt or your shoes or your haircut or the tone of your voice. In fact, I like you so little that if you’re not in that piece-of-shit Toyota and out of here in thirty seconds flat, I am going to run your ass in. Don’t tempt me.” Then he turned his back: I was dismissed.

Jerpbak was hovering over Petra’s window now. She stared straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. “License and registration,” Jerpbak said. She didn’t move. He repeated himself.

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

“License and registration.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Felix,” somebody said, and then they were all on their feet, nosing around me like hounds worrying the carcass of a rabbit. All except Vogelsang, that is. He sat there stoically, his features inscrutable, thumbing through his play money like Joe Stalin examining photographs of disloyal party chiefs. Though it was the middle of the night, and he had no intention of stepping out the door or coming into contact with any form of vegetative life, let alone poison oak, he was nonetheless wearing his NASA jumpsuit. I tried not to look at him.

For the first few minutes everyone was solicitous. Gesh poured me a shot of vodka, the only thing we had in the house, Dowst brewed some lukewarm tea, Aorta regarded me with interest, and Vogelsang asked some indirect questions pertaining to the nature of my confinement and how much the law knew about me. I alternately sipped warm vodka and cold tea, my stomach curdling with the bitter culture of guilt and dereliction, while Gesh tried to make sense of things.

Like the others, he was puzzled. What had I done? What was it all about? One minute he’d been snoring against the window frame, and the next he was staring into the whipcrack face of a highway patrolman. The patrolman said nothing, merely pointed to where I sat in the back seat of the cruiser, returned to his car and thundered up the highway. Gesh stared after us, incredulous, then drove to a phone booth and called Vogelsang. Vogelsang asked what had happened, and Gesh was only able to say that I’d been handcuffed to some woman and hauled off by the police. Gesh looked at me for confirmation, elucidation, enlightenment. I looked down at the floor.

Gesh’s voice faltered, then picked up again. Luckily, Vogelsang kept some cash on hand for just such an emergency, and promised to get on the horn to his lawyer and then drive up to Willits with the bail money. Fine. Terrific. Gesh had hung up, feeling relieved, but then found himself at a loss. He didn’t dare go near the police station, for fear he’d be implicated in whatever it was I’d done, and he couldn’t very well sit by the phone booth for the rest of the night. All at once it occurred to him that he should hustle up to the summer camp and alert Phil, in the event that legions of troopers were even then surrounding the place. They weren’t, and he’d had no recourse but to sit tight and soothe his frazzled nerves with alcohol. This he’d apparently succeeded in doing, as he was half drunk at the moment, the words clinging to his lips as if they’d been written out on strips of paper and pasted to the roof of his mouth. When he finished, everyone turned to me. I’d never known a more miserable moment.

“It was really stupid,” I said finally, and the room fell silent. The sound of the moths beating against the lamp screen transferred itself to my head, a frenzied thumping patter of drums. Beyond the windows, something — some creature of the night — let out a short sharp yip of pain or bloodlust. Hesitantly, like a man on the couch trying to reconstruct a dream, I told them what had happened, sparing no detail, and concluded by reasserting that the whole thing had been a foolish mistake, which I heartily regretted. No one said a word. “I feel like I’ve let everybody down,” I said after a moment. “I mean, Jerpbak’s got a vendetta against me now. I don’t see how I can go on.”

Dowst was watching me like a shark moving in on a gutted mackerel. Vogelsang was so alert I thought he was about to snap to attention and salute. Phil and Gesh averted their eyes.

“What I’m saying is, for the sake of the project I think it would be better if I quit.”

“No,” Gesh said. “You can’t do that.”

Phil screwed up his lazy eye and gave me a look of loyalty and camaraderie, a look that said teak tables and marble-topped oyster bars be damned. “I don’t see why you can’t stay on,” he said. “It’s not as though you got busted for a drug offense or anything, and Vogelsang already said his lawyer can postpone the trial till after the harvest. …”

“How much would you want?” Dowst said. “I mean, how would we split?” And then, in a rush: “Because you’d be breaking your contract.”

“That’s up to us, isn’t it?” Gesh shot back. “Me, Phil and Felix are together, remember?”

“Just asking, that’s all.” Dowst tugged at the flange of his long Yankee nose. “But I think he’s right — he ought to quit. For the sake of us all.”

Gesh had been sitting on the kitchen counter, legs dangling. Now he leapt to his feet. “Yeah, and maybe you ought to quit, too. You don’t do jack-shit up here anyway. Maybe you ought to just hump off to Sausalito and write a couple of articles on the chokeberry or something, huh?”

“Wait a minute,” Vogelsang said, pushing himself up from the table, “there’s no reason to get excited. I think there’s a rational solution to all this. You’ve got to remember”—pacing now—“we’ve got a thousand plants in the ground and we need Felix to help water and harvest them. We’re a long way from home yet.”

A thousand plants? What was that all about? Was he saying we had only half what we’d projected? I did some quick figuring, couldn’t help myself: one-third of $250,000 equals $83,333.33. Shit. All this for a lousy eighty-three thousand dollars? It wasn’t worth it. But then another part of me just as quickly grasped at it as if it were untold millions, as if I were a fever-wracked explorer clutching the map to the elephant burial ground in my trembling insatiable hands.

“I don’t see how—“ Dowst began, but Vogelsang cut him off.

“How about this,” Vogelsang said, spinning round to face us like Clarence Darrow delivering his peroration. “Felix stays. But for the next four and a half months,” and he ticked them off on his fingers, “July, August, September, October and the beginning of November, neither he nor the Toyota ever leaves the property.”

They were looking at me appraisingly now, the jury bringing in a guilty verdict. “No time off for good behavior?” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

“It’s up to you, Felix,” Vogelsang said. “I don’t see any other way. It’s going to be tough — you won’t even be able to go into town for groceries or anything. But that’s it. We can’t take the risk.” He was fumbling in his shirt pocket for something, the vial of breath neutralizer, no doubt, found himself frustrated, and then glanced back up at me. “You agree?”

I sat there in my chair like a prisoner in the dock, my face expressionless, a surge of joy and relief rising like a shout in my chest. I’d expected the worst — doom and exile — and I’d merely been sentenced to life at hard labor. Four and a half months of the farm. No Petra, no Chinowa, no fresh bagels or Sunday paper, no music, no films, no leisurely cups of capuccino at coffeehouses in North Beach. Nothing but tedium, dust, lizards and heat. And a chance to make it work.

“Well?” Vogelsang said.

Did I have a choice? I nodded my head. “Agreed.”

Chapter 5

Let me tell you about attrition. About dwindling expectations, human error, Mother Nature on the counteroffensive. Let me tell you about days without end, about the oppression of mid-afternoon, about booze and dope, horseshoes, cards, paperbacks read and reread till their covers fall to pieces, let me tell you about boredom and the loss of faith.

First off, Vogelsang was right. There were only a thousand plants in the ground. Or to be more precise, nine hundred fifty-seven. I know: I counted them. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke the day following my sojourn in the town jail. Early on, we’d planted better than one thousand seedlings, and then Dowst had managed to sprout and plant some six or seven hundred more — at least. Or so he’d said. We were aware that we’d fallen short of our original estimate, but we had no idea by how much. Five percent? Ten? Fifteen? It wasn’t our concern. We were the workers, the muscle, the yeomen, and Dowst and Vogelsang were the managers. The number of plants in the ground and the condition of those plants was their business; ours was to dig holes, string and mend fences, repair the irrigation system, and see that each plant got its two and a half gallons of H₂O per day. And so we’d never counted the plants. Never felt a need to. There were so many, after all, forests of them, their odor rank and sweet and overpowering, that we simply let ourselves get caught up in the fantasy of it, the wish that fulfills itself: of course we had two thousand plants.

But Vogelsang never made mistakes, and now I wasn’t so sure.

I lay there a moment atop my sweaty sleeping bag, a soiled sheet twisted at my ankles, and then staggered into the kitchen for a glass of water. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and the house was already so hot you could have baked bread on the counter. Phil was stretched out on the sofa behind a tattered copy of an E. Rice Burroughs novel, perfectly inert, a tall vodka collins in his hand. I peered through the yellowed window and saw that both van and Saab were gone. “Vogelsang and Dowst leave already?” I said.

Phil snorted. “What do you think — they’d stick around here a second more than they had to?” From above, in the insupportable heat of the loft, Gesh’s snores drifted down, dry as husks.

I drank from the tap, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Last night,” I began, rummaging through the refuse on the counter for a knife, peanut butter and bread, “Vogelsang said we’ve only got a thousand plants in the ground — that’s crazy, isn’t it?”

Phil shrugged. I was watching his face and he was watching mine. “I don’t know, seems like there’s a million when you’re watering.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know what you mean,” but fifteen minutes later I was out there in the feverish hammering heat of midday, notebook in hand, counting.

Bushes had gone brown, the grass was stiff and yellow. I trod carefully, terrified of the rattlesnakes that infested the place. (I had a deep-seated fear of snakes, of their furtiveness, their muscular phallic potency, the quickness of their thrust, and the terrible rending wound they left in the poisoned flesh. I always carried a snakebite kit with me — but of course I knew the rattler would never be so cooperative as to puncture my foot or hand, but instead would fasten onto my ear or eye or scrotum, thus negating the value of the kit — and during the cold weather, when there was no more than a chance in a million of encountering a snake of any kind, I’d worn leather gaiters. As soon as the heat had set in, and the snakes emerged, the gaiters had become too uncomfortable and I’d abandoned them.) I made a mark for every plant on the property, four across and a slash for five, and found that fewer than a thousand had survived the root rot, blight, and over- and under-watering that had afflicted them. Not to mention the hundreds — thousands? — that never emerged from the tough withered husks of their seedpods or succumbed to the depredations of various creatures, from the insects in the greenhouse to the bear. Nine fifty-seven. That was the figure I came up with, and that was the figure I presented to my co-workers after dinner that evening.

The evening watering was done, and we were standing out front of the house in the long shadows, pitching horseshoes for a dollar a game. “Vogelsang was right,” I told them, “we’ve got less than a thousand plants.” It was awful to contemplate: in one fell swoop our profits had been cut in half.

“Bummer,” Gesh said, and pitched a ringer to win the game. “That’s what, thirty-six dollars you owe me now, Felix.”

But this was just the beginning of our troubles, the first clear indication that we would have to revise our expectations downward. There were more to come. A week later, we began to notice that some of our healthiest plants — chest-high already and greener than a bucket of greenback dollars — were wilting. On closer inspection we saw that a narrow band had been cut or gnawed in the stem of each plant. We were bewildered. Had deer leapt eight feet in the air to vault our fences, bend their necks low to the ground, and nibble at the hard fibrous stems of the plants rather than graze the succulent leaves? Obviously not. Something smaller was responsible, some rabbity little bounding thing with an effective range about ankle-high and the ability to crawl under a deer fence. “Rabbits?” Phil guessed. “Gophers?”

It was then, with fear, loathing, regret and trepidation, that I remembered the dark scurrying forms I’d encountered that first day in the storage shed; a second later I made the connection with the rat traps we’d found scattered about Jones’s main growing area. “Rats,” I said.

We phoned Dowst. Rats, he informed us, live in the city. In garbage. A week later we’d lost upward of fifty plants, and we phoned him again. He looked preoccupied as he stepped out of the van, and I noticed that his skin had lost its color, as if he’d been spending a lot of time indoors, hunched over his notes on the virgin’s bower or the beard lichen. We walked down to Jonestown with him, squatted like farmers socializing outside the courthouse, and showed him the ring of toothmarks that had bled a vigorous plant dry in a week’s time. I watched as he ran a finger round the moist indentation and then brought it to his mouth to taste the fluid seeping from the wound. He was silent a moment, then looked up at us and announced that rabbits were decimating our crop. “They’re thirsty,” he explained, “and here you’ve got a standing fountain, seventy percent water.” He rose to his feet and brushed at his trousers. “The only thing to do is peg down the fences so they can’t get in underneath.”

We pegged. Crawled on our hands and knees through the rattlesnake-, scorpion- and tarantula-infested brush, the sweat dripping from our noses, and hammered stakes into the ground, stretching our chicken wire so tight even a beetle couldn’t have crawled under it. It took us a week. Dowst stayed on to supervise, to potter around the growing areas exuding expertise, and even, on occasion, to lend a hand. When we got the whole thing finished — all the fences in all the growing areas nailed down tight — I observed that we were still losing plants to the mystery gnawers, and suggested that the big bundles of twigs and downed branches we regularly came across in the woods and had as a matter of course enclosed within the confines of our now impervious fences were in fact rats’ nests and that rats, not rabbits, were the culprits. Dowst demurred. But two days later, as the plants continued to wither and the toothy girdles to proliferate, he authorized Phil to drive into Santa Rosa and purchase two hundred rat traps at Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply.

By now it was early August, nearly a month since my fateful scrape with the law. We had something like eight hundred and forty six-foot plants — bushes, trees — burgeoning around us. The boredom was crushing. We alternated early watering chores — two days on, one day off — so that each of us could sleep late two days a week. I almost preferred getting up early. At least you felt alive in the cool of the morning, traversing fields damp with dew, ducking through silent groves of oak and madrone, catching a glimpse of deer, fox, bobcat. We’d get back to the cabin at nine-thirty or ten, the temperature already past ninety, stuff something in our mouths and fall face forward on our worn mattresses. It would be one or two by the time we woke to the deadening heat, our nostrils parched, throats dry as dunes, and joined the late sleeper in the continuous round of drinking, pot smoking, cards, and horseshoes that would put us away, dead drunk and disoriented, in the wee hours of the morning.

Each day was the same, without variation. Occasionally the pump would break down and Gesh would take it to a repairman in town and attempt to be casual about what he was doing with twenty-five-hundred gallons of water a day, or Dowst would pay a visit with magazines, newspapers, vodka and ice. But that was about it for excitement. The cards wore thin, the walls developed blisters from the intensity of our stares, we began to know the household lizards by name. “Gollee,” Phil would say, slipping into an Atchafalaya drawl as we sat silently over our fiftieth game of pitch, “I haven’t had this much fun since the hogs ate my baby sister.”

If we saw Dowst once or twice a week, we rarely saw Vogelsang. As the plants blossomed into hard evidence, he made himself increasingly scarce, more than ever the silent partner. “Look, I’ve got too much to lose,” he told us one night after he’d been summoned to repair the kick start on the surviving Kawasaki. “I just can’t take the risk of being seen up here or identified in any way with this operation. I’ve got business interests, property in three states, a number of other deals in the works …” and he waved his hand to show the futility of trying even to intimate the scope of his interests. We watched that exasperated hand in silence, thinking our own thoughts about how much he had to lose, and by extension, how little we had. To lose.

For my part, the euphoria of being allowed to stay on was quickly exhausted, and I’d come to feel as oppressed as my coworkers by the drudgery and the unvarying routine. During the long slow hours of the interminable sweltering afternoons, propped up in a chair with a tall vodka and tonic and some moronic sci-fi paperback Phil had picked up at a used-book store in Ukiah ("The classics, Phil,” I’d tell him, “get me something fat by Dostoevski or Dickens or somebody"), I began to feel I was aestivating, my clock wound down, brain numbed. It was then, more than ever, that I would find myself thinking of Petra.

One evening, while we stood round the horseshoe pit, winning, losing and exchanging chits, Dowst’s van slid through the trees along the road and swung into the field, jouncing toward us across the brittle yellow expanse of the yard like a USO wagon come to some remote outpost. We were shirtless, bearded, dirty, our jeans sun-bleached and boots cracked with age and abuse. Behind us the sun flared in the sky, fat and red as a tangerine, and a host of turkey vultures, naked heads, glossy wings, converged on the carcass of some luckless creature struck down behind the shed. Puddles of crushed glass glinted at our feet, the sagging out-buildings eased toward the ground like derelicts bedding down for the night, and the cabin, pale as driftwood, radiated heat in scalloped waves until you had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t on fire. For an instant I saw the scene from Dowst’s eyes — from the eyes of an outsider, an emissary from the world of hot tubs and Cuisinarts — and realized that we must have looked like mad prospectors, like desert rats, like the sad sun-crazed remnants of Pizarro’s band on the last leg of the road to Eldorado.

Dowst backed out of the van, crablike, his arms laden, and disappeared into the house. A moment later he emerged, newspaper in hand, and crossed the yard to join us. He was wearing white shorts and an alligator-emblazoned shirt, tennis shoes and pink-tinted shades. “Hi,” he said, gangling and affable, as relaxed as a man who’s just played two sets of tennis before brunch, and then held out the newspaper as if it were a new steel racket or a Frisbee. “I thought you guys might want to see this.”

See what? VOGELSANG ELECTED MAYOR; POT SOARS ON COMMODITIES MARKET; JERPBAK TRANSFERRED TO JERUSALEM. We saw the front page of the Chronicle, blocks of print, a murky photograph. Puzzled, we crowded round him, scanning the headlines, passing quickly over the stories of corruption in government, poverty in the Third World and carnage in the Seychelles, until the following story leapt out from the page to seize us like the iron grip of a strangler:

WAR DECLARED ON POT GROWERS

The Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department of Justice have formulated plans for a federally funded assault on growers of high-grade sinsemilla marijuana along the Northern California coast, the Chronicle learned today. A federal law-enforcement grant of $400,000 has been rushed through to enable the newly formed “Sinsemilla Strike Force” to begin operations before the fall harvest season. The strike force will coordinate federal agents and local police departments in “sniffing out illicit growing operations,” as one source put it, in Mendocino, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties. Aerial surveillance, including the use of infra-red photography, will, it is hoped, pinpoint the locations of so many of the large-scale farms, while a program of special cash rewards for turning in growers is expected to help in exposing others.

“People are tired of this sort of thing,” a source close to the strike force said, “and they resent the outsiders that come into their community for illegal and often highly lucrative purposes. We’re confident that the reward system will make it easier for local residents to help us identify and apprehend the criminals in their midst.”

Operations could begin as early as next month, the source disclosed.

Dowst was grinning sheepishly, a slight flush to his cheeks, as if he’d just told an off-color joke at a lawn party. “Not such great news, huh?”

For some reason, the story didn’t affect me as it would have a few months earlier. I was alarmed, certainly, all the vital functions thrown into high gear as I read on, but I wasn’t panicked. In fact, relatively speaking, I was calm. Perhaps my run-in with Jerpbak and the little scene I’d gone through with Savoy—everybody knows what you guys are doing up there—had made me fatalistic. Perhaps I expected a bust. Perhaps I wanted it.

Gesh was not quite so calm. He snatched the paper from Dowst’s hands, balled it up and attempted to punt it into the trees. Then he turned on him, his face splayed with anger. “What next?” he shouted, as if Dowst were to blame. “Christ!” he roared, and spun round to face the empty hills.

Phil was pale. He tried to laugh it off, improvising a halfhearted joke about infra-red pot and reading glasses for the eye in the sky, until his words trailed off in a little self-conscious bleat of laughter.

Then, in what had almost become a reflex gesture for him, Gesh wheeled around to jab a thick admonitory finger in Dowst’s face. “Between the rats and the bears and you and Vogelsang and now the fucking federal government, there’s going to be precious little of this pot to split up, you know that?”

Dowst knew it. And so did we.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The following day, after he’d made a tour of the plantation and monitored the growth of each leaf, stem and twig, Dowst announced that he’d begun sexing the plants and that within a month all the males should have emerged. “Around the end of September, after the photoperiod begins to decline; that’s when we’ll get them all.”

Phil and I were playing checkers; Gesh was dozing on the couch, a newspaper spread over his face. It was mid-afternoon, and the heat was like a wasting disease. “Huh?” I said.

“You know,” Dowst was rattling through the cans of soup in the cupboard under the sink, “for sinsemilla pot. We’ve got to weed out the male plants.”

That was something we’d known all along, in the way we knew that chickens laid eggs whether there was a rooster or not, or that Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system — it was part of our general store of knowledge. But we hadn’t really stopped to think about it, to consider its ramifications or work it into our formulae for translating plants into dollars. Any fool knew that in order to get sinsemilla pot you had to identify and eliminate the male plants so that the energy of the unfertilized females would go toward production of the huge, resinous, THC-packed colas that made seedless pot the most potent, desirable and highly priced smoke on the market. Any fool. But to this point we’d conveniently managed to overlook it.

I watched Phil’s face as the realization of what Dowst was saying seeped into his nervous system and gave vent to various autonomous twitches of mortification and regret. “You mean … we’ve got to … to … throw out some of the plants?”

Dowst had found a can of Bon Ton lobster bisque and was applying the opener to it. “Usually about fifty percent. It could be higher or lower. Depending.”

Phil looked like a man being strapped into the electric chair while his wife French-kisses the D.A. in the hallway. “On what?”

The lobster bisque was the color of diarrhea. Dowst sloshed it into his spotless Swiss aluminum camp pot and stirred it with a spoon he’d carefully disinfected over the front burner. “Luck,” he said finally, and he pronounced the word as if it had meaning, pronounced it like the well-washed Yankee optimist he was, a man who could trace his roots back to the redoubtable Dowsts on the Mayflower. Besides, he had his van, a condo in Sausalito and a monthly stipend from his trust fund. He didn’t need luck.

I thought of Mendel’s pea plants, x and y chromosomes, thought of all those hale and hearty many-branching glorious male plants that would be hacked down and burned — fifty percent of the crop in a single swoop and the second such swoop in a month’s time. Numbers invaded my head like an alien force, a little problem in elementary arithmetic: Take 840 pot plants and divide by 2. Divide again, allowing for one-half pound of marketable pot per plant, to solve for the total number of pounds obtained. Multiply this figure by $1600, the going rate per pound. Now divide by 3 to arrive at the dollar value of each share — the financiers, the expert’s and the yeomen’s — and finally divide by 3 again to find the miserable pittance that you yourself will receive after nine months of backbreaking labor, police terror and exile from civilization.

Dowst was whistling. Phil gnawed at the edge of a black plastic checker, expressionless, his eyes vacant. My half million had been reduced to $37,000. Barring seizure, blight, insect depredation and unforeseeable natural disasters, that is. It was a shock. If Jerpbak, ravenous rodents and the “Sinsemilla Strike Force” had driven a stake through my heart, Dowst had just climbed atop the coffin to nail down the lid.

I awoke the following morning to the tortured rasping of the pickup’s starter and the hacking cough of combustion that eventually succeeded it. Bleary, disoriented — what time was it, anyway? Five-thirty? Six? — I rolled out of bed and trundled up the hallway and into the front room, where I stood in my underwear and peered groggily out the window. The pickup sat motionless in the high weeds, a coil of shadowy exhaust winding from the tailpipe as I watched with a vague, unformed curiosity, emerging from dreams as from a lake. Then a dull tooth of light glinted from the pickup’s windshield as the vehicle heaved forward and rocked across the tarnished field, tailgate clanking, stiff grass giving way, birds bitching in the trees: there was the valediction of the brake lights, and it was gone. I stood there a moment longer, perplexed, scratching at my privates, until a voice spoke at me from the gloom of the far corner. “Gesh and Phil,” the voice said.

Dowst, I saw now, was sitting at the kitchen table over a bowl of granola, shaking vitamin tablets into his palm from a forest of plastic vials. A soft, aqueous light suffused the room, pressing like a swollen balloon against the familiar objects of the place, softening corners, spreading shadows.

“What time is it?” I said.

“Five.”

Five. I let that register, still scratching, then allowed my awakening mind to seize on the next question. “Where are they going?”

Dowst sighed. His eyes, pale in the best of light, were rinsed of color in the incipient gray of the morning. “Tahoe,” he said.

“Tahoe?”

“For three days. R and R, they said. Both of them said they couldn’t sleep.”

Little wonder, I thought, after the cheering news of the past few weeks (slash, hack, another integer bites the dust). It was my turn to sigh. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down across from Dowst.

So they were gone. Disheartened, disillusioned, shorn of hope, spirit and animation, heads bowed, tails between their legs, the oyster bar reduced to a burger counter, the yacht to a dinghy. For one disjointed instant I wondered if I’d ever see them again, wondered if they’d decided to bag it, write the whole thing off and go back to the lost world of prawns, Mai Tais and teriyaki. But then, as I considered it, certitude came over me in a rush, and I knew — categorically and beyond the shadow of a doubt — that they would be back. Of course they would. A hundred and sixty thousand, eighty thousand, forty, twenty — what difference did it make? It was all they had. They needed this thing as badly as I did — if it failed, after all the hope and sweat and toil we’d invested in it, then the society itself was bankrupt, the pioneers a fraud, true grit, enterprise and daring as vestigial as adenoids or appendixes. We believed in Ragged Dick, P. T. Barnum, Diamond Jim Brady, in Andrew Carnegie, D. B. Cooper, Jackie Robinson. In the classless society, upward mobility, the law of the jungle. We’d seen all the movies, read all the books. We never doubted that we would make it, that one day we would be the fat cats in the mansion on the hill. Never. Not for a moment. After all, what else was there?

Dowst and I did the morning watering; then I went back to bed. When I woke about noon, bathed in sweat, Dowst was perched on the edge of the couch, his duffel bag packed, leafing through an issue of Fremontia. “Listen,” he said, “I wonder if you could handle the watering by yourself tonight. I’m supposed to meet this friend of mine in the botany department at Berkeley — we’re going to have drinks and dinner in Santa Rosa. It’s really important. I could wind up with a two-year appointment there if things work out.”

I was being deserted for the second time that day. I was hot, disappointed, lonely, restless and beset with vague fears. I shrugged.

“Because I’d really appreciate it,” Dowst said, getting to his feet. “I mean, uh, I’ll probably be back late tonight — no, I’ll definitely be back tonight — so I can help you with the morning watering. And for the next couple of days, too — until those guys get back.”

I nodded wearily, and he was gone. I listened to the smooth rumble of the van’s engine until the sound was swallowed up in the rattle of insects and the harsh glottal complaint of a crow perched outside the door. The house blistered around me. I heard a shingle crack, watched a lizard emerge from a rent in the wall and disappear behind the couch. It was then that it seized me. An idea, a point of perspective, an exhilarating, lubricious, uninhibited foretaste of forbidden fruit. I was alone. I could do anything I wanted — anything — and no one would be the wiser.

But no. I’d given my word. Jerpbak lay in wait for me out there, the Sinsemilla Strike Force was poised to strike. Besides, I couldn’t leave the place unguarded — what if Sapers came nosing around? Or if some hiker or cowboy blundered across our sweet fields of money trees? No, I couldn’t leave the place, I couldn’t.

Thirty seconds later I was in the bedroom, poking through the mound of clothes in the corner and sniffing socks and T-shirts to discover the least offensive. It’s been over a month, I was thinking as I dug the dirt from beneath my nails with the blade of a pocketknife. From somewhere below, the crow let out a long rasping laugh and then flapped past the window like a knot of rags. My twice-brushed teeth gleamed at me in the mirror, my eyes were feverish. I eased down on the edge of the bed and pulled on a pair of white jeans, lamentably stained in the crotch with a blot of red wine but otherwise presentable, and then spit-polished my Dingo boots. Over a month. She wouldn’t even remember me. I held the keys in my hand. Would she?

Chapter 6

The shop bell made a prim, little-girl-peeing sort of sound, the sun blasted the back of my head, a smell of sweet herbs and the music of the spheres enveloped me, and I shut the door on a cool, leafy potter’s paradise. Outside, the streets were like furnaces, dust, glare, hot tires on hot pavement; here was the peace of a pine forest, soft-lit from the skylights above, suffused with the sweet scent of the sachets that clung to the beams like cocoons, viridescent with plants spilling from hanging pots, reaching for the ceiling from ceramic floor planters, sending tendrils out to embrace the weathered barn siding that silvered the walls. I stood there a moment, my back to the door, catching my breath like a man emerging from the sauna to plunge into a cold bath. Gentle breezes wafted, hidden speakers filled the room with a chorus of voices that rose and fell in passionate certitude — Bach, wasn’t it? Yes, J. S. Bach sending a glorious full-throated missive to a merciful and present God.

I looked around me and saw the colors of the earth. Muted browns, sienna, umber, the palest of yellows. I saw Boston fern, philodendron, wandering Jew, myrtle and jade. I saw pottery — vases, planters, tureens, amphorae, urns, earthenware cups, glasses, pitchers, plates, finger bowls. There were ceramic bells and windchimes, massive cookpots, diminutive snuffboxes. And all arranged with taste and discrimination, set out on shelves, sideboards, a huge walnut table with place settings for eight and a delicate faience vase of cut flowers as a centerpiece. I felt as if I’d stepped into a bower, a bedroom, a church. I pushed my hair back, wiped my sweating palms on the thighs of my pants and waited.

Nothing happened.

I listened to kyrie eleisons, examined this pot or that, discovered a fat orange cat and stroked its ears. Then I noticed a smaller bell, the familiar businesslike tinny sort of thing I’ve always associated with elementary school classrooms and hotel lobbies. I depressed the plunger—bing-bing, bing-bing—and was rewarded, a moment later, by the appearance of Petra.

She emerged from a door at the rear of the shop, dressed in a smock that flowed from her like a gown. She was barefoot, and a thin silver chain cut a V at her throat. I watched her official smile give way to a look of misplaced recognition. “Hi,” I said.

“Oh,” she murmured, stalling for time like a game-show contestant who’s just been shown, for the purpose of identification, the monumental color slide of a bearded president. “Hi.”

We smiled at one another.

“Fred?” she said.

“Felix,” I corrected.

“Felix,” she said.

I told her I’d dropped in to see how she was doing. She said she was doing fine and asked me how the fishing was. Her teeth were white, flawless, like something out of a toothpaste ad. “Fishing?” I repeated, puzzled, caught off guard, thinking of teeth and lips and the ache of enforced celibacy, until I remembered the lame story I’d concocted over the jack handle on that eventful evening a month back. “Lunkers,” I blurted, “we’ve been catching lunkers. Yellowtails, guppies and monkey-faced eels.”

To my relief, she laughed, and then turned to lift a ceramic teapot from a hot plate and offer me a cup of herb tea (rose hips or some such crap, which I detest and normally refuse, but managed somehow to accept gracefully). And then, stirring our tea, something magical happened — in a single leap we were able to extricate ourselves from the slough of trivia and small talk, and focus on the subject that bound us in intimacy: Jerpbak. Jerpbak, our mutual tormentor and bitterest enemy, our jailer, the agent that had brought us together, wed us, bound us flesh to flesh. I watched her eyes over the teacup and saw the back seat of Jerpbak’s cruiser. “Is he still bothering you?” I said.

She shook her head. We were sitting at the big walnut table holding ceramic cups, while cars rushed by the window and Bach marched steadily forward, taking little figures and swelling them to great ones. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Not since … well, not since I saw you last. I mean, when we met.” She coughed into her fist and colored a bit.

I waved my hand as if to say It’s no big deal, I’m glad I stopped, I’d do it again anytime, swim out to Alcatraz and do thirty years in the federal pen for a glance from you, babe, and told her — with all the flourishes — of my scrape with Jerpbak at the Eldorado County jail.

“God, that guy is nuts,” she said. “He’s not responsible for his actions. If they don’t do something with him he’s going to hurt somebody one of these days.” She took a short angry sip of her tea. “Do you think he recognized you?”

“Who cares?” I said, hot and reckless, the tough guy, and then tried to shrug the whole thing off by telling her I’d got hold of a lawyer (which was true) who had assured me I would get off on all counts (not true), as I really hadn’t done anything, when you came right down to it (also true).

“You were acting like a rational human being, that’s all,” she said, fixing me with the kind of look Joan of Arc must have taken into battle with her. “I’ll testify to that.”

We sat there a moment in silence, brooding over the wrongs done us, and then she observed that the whole thing was ironic in a way.

“Ironic?”

“Yes, well,” she said, lowering her eyes, “I was the cause of the whole mess, and I actually got off easier than you. A lot easier. Compared to what you went through, I was lucky.” The resisting arrest charge, it seemed, had merely been a threat, and Jerpbak had not followed through on it. She’d been booked and then released on the promise of returning in the morning with her license, and given forty-eight hours to correct the defects Jerpbak had ferreted out in the antique hulk of her VW Bug — from improperly displayed license plates to inoperable signal lights and eviscerated muffler — in lieu of paying the fines. It had cost her a hundred and twenty dollars in repair bills, she said, but at least she was free of it. And then her voice dropped to a whisper and she gave me the sort of look only martyrs nailed to the cross have a right to hope for: “I’m really sorry you had to get involved. If there’s anything I can do …”

There was plenty she could do, I thought, in terms of local anesthesia and release of tension, and to avoid leering at her — she was feeling sorry for me, feeling sorry and grateful, and I didn’t want to blow it by leaping at her like a sex maniac — I looked at my watch. It was one-thirty. Lunchtime. While I debated asking her to lunch (no doubt she’d already nibbled an alfalfa-sprout-and-feta-cheese sandwich while hunched over the potter’s wheel), I bought a vase I couldn’t afford, thinking I’d use it to enliven the déeAcor at the summer camp or else ship it to my ninety-year-old maiden aunt in Buffalo.

“You sure you want this?” Petra asked me.

I nodded vigorously, mumbling something banal about the quality of the craftsmanship and the intricacy of the design.

“Do you know what it is?”

“A vase,” I said.

She laughed — a short, toothy, ingenuous laugh — and then informed me that it was a funerary urn. “For ashes.”

“Okay,” I said, “you got me. I was going to put flowers in it.” I held up a qualifying finger. “Dead flowers.”

I was the soul of wit. We laughed together. She poured me a second cup of the wretched acidic tea (it tasted like a petroleum derivative) and asked if I’d like to see her workshop. “We’ll call it an educational tour,” she said, rising from the table.

I followed her into a brilliantly lit back room — cement floor, lath-and-plaster walls, high banks of gymnasium windows. It was hotter back here and the place smelled strongly of the clay that dominated it, coating everything in a fine thin layer, like volcanic ash or the residue of a dust storm. Petra took me round the room in a slow sweeping arc, pointing out the plastic bags of clay, the potter’s wheel, her kiln the size of a gingerbread house, the buckets of glazes and the greenware in the drier. I smelled the ferment of the earth, fingered the clay and marveled at its moistness and plasticity; I saw her in her smock and her bare feet and felt I knew her. When I thought I’d seen everything and was trying to wrest the flow of the conversation from ceramics and push it in the direction of lunch, she gave me an odd look — eyes half-lidded, lips curled in a serene inscrutable smile — and asked if I’d like to see her real work.

“Real work?” I echoed. The room was as still and dry as an ancient riverbed; pots uncountable and in every phase of production littered the floor, the makeshift shelves, the drying racks and firing trays. I was puzzled.

She crooked her finger and I followed her — she in jogger’s shorts, her long naked legs leaping from the cutaway smock, me in my least offensive T-shirt and most imbecilic smile — to a doorway at the far end of the room. I’d seen the door earlier and taken it for a closet, but now she flipped a light switch and led me into still another room. Perhaps the blandness of the workroom and my growing preoccupation with lunch had lulled me, but this was a surprise: suddenly I found myself amidst a host of strange figures, colors that pulsed, glazes that dazzled. If the shop was a potter’s paradise, then this was the treasury of the gods. Or no: this was the dwarf kingdom. Bearded, mustachioed, long-eared and thick-browed, fifty faces leered at mine, their expressions crazed, demented, vacant. Human figures, two-thirds scale, stood, sat and crouched round the room, their heads pointed, eyes veiled, lips curled with private smiles or fat with the defective’s pout. It was like being on a subway in Manhattan. I laughed.

Petra seemed relieved. She was grinning. “You like them?”

I was making various marveling noises — tongue clucks, throaty exclamations of wonder, giggles that rose in crescendo to choke off at the top. I stroked the slick, brightly glazed dunce cap of a man perched on the edge of a park bench and reading a newspaper. “Todd Browning,” I said. “Fellini.”

She nodded. “And Viola Frey. And Robert Arneson.”

“And you,” I said.

“And me.”

A trio in buskins and leotards — men? women? — groped for a ball suspended from a string; a child with the drooping features of Leonid Brezhnev played at jacks. “These are great,” I said, unraveling my arm to indicate the full range of them. “They’re hilarious and weird, they’re grotesque. Has anybody seen them?”

Petra was leaning against an enormously fat woman in a bridal gown decorated with dancing fishes. “A few people,” she said, and I felt a surge of exhilaration (she was showing them to me, I was one of the chosen) and a corresponding jolt of jealousy (to whom else had she shown them?). Pots and creamers and orange-juice pitchers were okay, she said after a moment, and she enjoyed doing them — but she was an artist, too, and these pieces were an expression of that side of her. She was collecting them for a show in San Francisco.

I asked her if she knew anything about metal sculpture, and then if she’d ever heard of Phil Cherniske. “He does — he did — these big preposterous things in metal,” I said. “He used to be known as Phil Yonkers?”

She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, looked distracted, but she said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then: “Have you had lunch yet?”

“No,” the word a hurtling shell, my lips the barrel of an artillery gun, “no, I haven’t.”

“Because I was going to close early — now, in fact — and go to a barbecue at this little country bar just outside of town. You know, steak and ribs and whatnot. They’re celebrating national heifer week or something and a friend of mine who runs a health-food store made up some of the salads. I mean, I’m not that much into red meat, but I thought it might be fun.”

“Sure,” I said, marveling at how easy it was. “Sure, sounds like fun.”

She was smiling like all the angels in heaven. “Great,” she said. “Let me just take off this smock and get my purse,” and she started out of the room, only to swing round at the doorway and lean into the post for a moment. “Maybe you know the place? It’s on the Covelo road?”

One of the ceramic pinheads reached out and punched me in the solar plexus but I held on, praying, gasping for breath, feeling the great hot tongs of fate fishing around for me as if I were a lobster in a pot.

“It’s called Shirelle’s.”

Chapter 7

The parking lot at Shirelle’s — that barren wasteland, that tundra — was as packed with vehicles as a used-car lot. There were pickups, RVs, Mustangs, Bobcats and Impalas, choppers, dirt-bikes and Mopeds, Trans Ams and Sevilles, woodies, dune buggies, vans — and the monolithic cherry-red cab of a Peterbilt truck, a machine among toys, rising like an island from the sea of steel and chrome. Beyond the cars I could make out cowboy hats and tiny sun-flamed faces and the metronomic dip and rise of the head of a grazing horse. I recognized the scene. Bingo under the trees, the church picnic, county fair. Children ran squalling through a blue-black haze of barbecue smoke, dogs yelped, Frisbees hung in the air. Over it all came the inevitable twanging thump of amplified country music—Duckett, duckett, duck-etttt/Duck, duck, duck-etttt—and the hoots and yahoos of inebriated giants in big-brimmed straw hats. I swung into the lot with a crunch of gravel and found a parking spot between two glistening, high-riding pickups. “Well,” I said, turning to Petra, “this is it, huh?”

She was leaning forward in her seat, legs long and naked and brown, scanning the lot with the intensity of a child at the fair. “There’s Sarah’s car,” she said, “and that’s Teddy’s motorcycle.” She shot a look past me. “And good, good. Alice is here, too.” Her hand was on my arm, light as a breath of air, heavy as a shackle. “I think you’re really going to like them.”

Odd, I thought, emerging from the car, that I’d barely noticed all this on my way into town an hour and a half ago. (I’d been aware of an unusual level of activity — cars swinging in and out of the lot, music blaring — but had been afraid to look too closely for fear I’d find myself staring into Savoy’s face, or Shirelle’s or Sapers’s or George Pete Turner’s.) Odder still that we’d taken my car — the interdicted Toyota — but I’d felt, for reasons that have to do with the masculine ego and the need to assert it, that I should be in command. Despite the fact that Petra had offered to drive and that the very sight of the Toyota was a provocation to every law enforcement officer within a thirty-mile radius.

I slammed my door. Petra slammed hers. I stood there a moment in the hellish sun, the smell of burning meat in my nostrils, and felt as naked and exposed as a sinner at the gates of Dis. Twice before I’d trod this very ground, and twice before I’d found myself in deep trouble. The place was a sink of enmity, a nest of yahooism, as fraught with danger as the Willits police station. (Quick clips of the leering faces of Sapers, Marlon, Shirelle, Savoy and Jerpbak passed in review through the contracting lens of my consciousness.) Good God. I’d gone back on my word, left the farm wide open to discovery and paraded my car about the streets, and now here I was, strolling blithely into the lion’s den as if I had nothing to fear. What am I doing? I thought, suddenly seized with panic. Couldn’t I control my urges, get a grip on myself, act like an adult? Of course I could, yes, of course. It wasn’t too late. I’d tell Petra that I didn’t feel well, that I hated fairs, country music, sunshine, that my parents had been missionaries roasted by cannibals and that the smell of the barbecue pit turned my stomach. But then she took my hand to lead me forward, and something rose up in me that had neither regard for danger nor respect for fear, and I felt nothing but bliss.

Admission, FOR ALL THE MEAT, BEER AND SALLID YOU CAN HOLD, was six dollars, and we stood in front of a card table manned by a rapier-nosed, watery-eyed old fellow in a plaid shirt while Petra dug through her purse and I examined the contents of my pockets. I had about fourteen or fifteen dollars to last me the rest of my life, but for the same reason I’d insisted on driving, I attempted to pay for both of us. I came up with two fives and two singles that were so worn they looked like leaf mulch, and laid them on the table, but Petra wouldn’t hear of it. “No way,” she said, scooping up the bills and forcing them into my front pocket. “I invited you, remember?”

The old man looked confused. He stared up at us out of pale, swollen eyes, then produced a handkerchief and blew his nose carefully, tenderly, as if he were aware that each blow might be his last. “Two?” he said, his voice distant and cracked, and then held out a trembling pink hand to take the twenty Petra offered him. As he fumbled for change in the cigar box at his elbow and then carefully tore two pale orange stubs from a wheel of all-purpose tickets, I couldn’t help thinking, with shame and mortification and an odd sensation of arousal, of the makeshift desk at the suck palace and the ten sordid despairing minutes I’d given up there. I took the ticket guiltily — ADMIT ONE — and followed Petra, my guide and support, into the roped-off area that enclosed the sickly tree, the gaping dark entrance to the bar and the smoking pit.

For the first few minutes I kept my head down, tense and wary, concentrating on bits of broken glass in the dirt, on the sharp, minatory toes of cowboy boots, on bare ankles, painted toenails and snub-nosed sneakers. Petra led me to the beer booth, where I studied the footprints in the beer-muddied earth and the way the froth dissolved at the bartender’s feet. “What’ll it be, honey?” the bartender asked, twanging the verb until it fell somewhere between bee and bay.

“Two beers,” I said, addressing his belt buckle.

Petra laughed. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “My voice is changing.”

I stole a glance at the guffawing bartender, expecting Lloyd Sapers or George Pete Turner, and was relieved to find myself staring into the grinning, wild-eyed, gold-toothed, sun-blasted face of a drunken stranger in a Stetson hat. “Good beer, boy,” he said, handing me two plastic cups filled to the rim. “Drink up. We got a bottomless keg here.”

I nodded, wrenched my face into a simulated grin and gave the crowd a quick scan (the backs and profiles of strangers, naked shoulders, sunburned beer bellies, bola ties and blue jeans), and then ducked my head again, expecting the blade to fall at any moment. Then Petra said, “There’s Sarah,” and nudged me in the direction of a maze of tables heaped with food.

Sarah was tall, broad-shouldered and bosomy, dressed in Dan-skin top and jeans, her hair teased straight out from her head until it looked like one of those furry hats worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace. She sat at a long table behind a sign advertising her health-food store — THE SEEDS OF LIFE — and served falafel, tahini, tofu salad and carrot juice as alternatives to the ceremonial slabs of bloody beef that made National Heifer Week the event that it was. She wasn’t doing much business. I took her hand as Petra introduced us, then watched as she scribbled “Out to Lunch” over the store logo and laid a sheet of plastic wrap over the tofu salad. “Everybody’s over here,” she said, and we followed her past the smoking barbecue pit (out of the corner of my eye I saw billowing smoke, vague menacing figures, the glow of hot coals) to a blanket spread out in the shade of the building.

The three occupants of the blanket — Teddy (a little guy in racing leathers whom I took to be Sarah’s beau), Alice (a health-food nut, thin as a refugee), and a big, box-headed character with a wire-thin Little Richard mustache — smiled benevolently at us as we eased down amidst a clutter of paper plates and plastic cups, denuded ribs, puddled grease and pinto beans. I sat between Petra and Sarah, and sucked the foam from my beer. Flies hovered, the big P.A. speakers crackled, smoke spun off into the sky.

Petra introduced me — everyone seemed to be familiar with our connection, and this pleased me — and then Little Richard said that he’d just got back from three weeks in Hawaii, tuning pianos. This led to two distinct but rapidly converging threads of conversation: the Islands and the trade of piano tuning. Sarah said she was tone deaf. Teddy said that he once swam with humpback whales off Maui. Alice looked up from a plate of shredded carrots and said that she preferred Debussy’s Etudes to anything Chopin ever did — especially when she was in Hawaii. Did the tropical air make tuning more difficult? Petra wondered. Richard tied up the loose ends neatly with an anecdote about sun bathing in Kaanapali with his tuning forks, and then turned to me and said, “So what do you do, fella?”

These were dangerous conversational waters, and I could see the shoals and reefs prickling about me. Earlier, in the car, Petra had asked the same question and I’d begged off by saying, “You know — a little of this and a little of that.” “Sounds like a pretty evasive answer,” she’d retorted, and I’d dropped the corners of my mouth and said, “You’re right. Actually I run guns to Libya.” Now I opted for the straightforward approach. I looked Richard in the eye and told him I inspected airplane fuselages for stress fractures.

“Oh,” he said, and then the conversation rushed on past me, expanding to touch on methods of tofu preparation, the heat, the shameless behavior of a number of people I didn’t know, and the political situation in Central America. I leaned back on the blanket, scanning the crowd for trouble, smiling amenably at Petra’s friends and whispering nonstop witticisms in her ear. And oh, yes: drinking beer. It seemed that every time I took a swallow or two someone would hand me a fresh cup. This had a two-fold effect — of relaxing my guard (so what if I ran across Sapers or one of the other yokels — they had nothing on me) and suppressing my appetite. When Petra got us a plate of potato salad and chili beans, I did a couple of finger exercises with my plastic fork and then drained another beer.

After a while the conversation went dead, the C&W band lurched into some rural funk, and Sarah and Teddy got up to dance. Little Richard was passed out at the edge of the blanket, the sun filtering through the leaves to illuminate each separate astonishing whisker of his mustache, and Alice excused herself to go tend Sarah’s health-food stand. I thought of asking Petra to dance, but since I hate dancing, I decided against it. Instead I told her that I hadn’t meant to be flippant or to hide anything when she’d asked me what I did for a living, and sketched in what I’d been doing for the past year or so — that is, refurbishing Victorians in a slow market and reading banal, subliterate freshman papers as a part-timer at Cabrillo Community College. I didn’t mention the summer camp.

She looked disappointed. Or skeptical. “So you live in San Francisco?”

I nodded. “But I’m up here for the summer with a couple of friends — just to get away, you know?” “I know. Fishing, right?”

We smiled at each other. “Yeah, well, we do actually go fishing sometimes. But mainly the idea is just to rough it, you know, get out of the city, listen to the crickets, hike in the mountains.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her, and then she dropped her head to trace a pattern in the blanket. I felt then that she saw right through me, knew as well as Vogelsang what I was doing in Willits. Lies beget other lies, I thought — now’s the time to come clean, to start the relationship off right. But I didn’t come clean. I couldn’t. I was about to say more, to get myself in deeper, when she lifted her glass and said “Cheers.”

For the next hour or so, while the sun made a molten puddle of the parking lot and the band hammered away at their guitars as if the instruments had somehow offended them, we talked, getting to know each other, comparing notes. I learned about Petra’s childhood in Evanston, summers spent sailing on the Great Lakes, her talent for design and the first misshapen piece she’d ever fired (a noseless bust of Janis Joplin). Her father was an architect, her mother was dead. Auto accident. She had a sister named Helen. She liked green chartreuse, Husky dogs and old-time Chicago Blues. She was twenty-nine. When she was in the tenth grade, attending a private school, she’d met a guy two years her senior, an athlete, high achiever and verbal whiz. They dated. He was class president, she was secretary of the Art Club. He went to the University of Iowa, she went to the University of Iowa. They dated strenuously, lived together, got married. He went to law school, she worked (in a Kentucky-style-chicken franchise where they went through thirty gallons of lard a day). When he graduated and got a job with a firm in San Francisco, they moved to a skylit apartment on Dolores Street and she began doing ceramics in earnest. One night he told her he was bored. Bored? she said. I don’t want to talk about it, he said. Two days later he was gone. She called the law firm. He hadn’t been in for over a week. Later she heard that he was in Amsterdam, living on a barge, then someone saw him at a jazz club in Oslo. With a Danish girl. After that, she stopped asking.

I made sympathetic noises. How could anyone — be he deaf, dumb, blind, castrated — walk out on her? I was thinking, and then realized that someone, somewhere, could be thinking the same thing about Ronnie. Square pegs, round holes.

We drank beer. Petra stretched her legs, applied tanning oil to thighs and forearms, offered me potato salad as if it were caviar. It was hot, it was dry, there was too much dust, too much noise and there were too many people, but I hardly noticed — I gave my full attention to Petra, mooning over her like some ridiculous lovelorn swain out of Shakespeare or Lyly, ready to jump up and swoon at the drop of a hat. We drank more beer. Teddy and Sarah fumbled back to the blanket, panting and running sweat, stolidly drained their warm beers and staggered back to the dance floor. Then Petra handed me her empty cup and rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’. Would you get me another beer?”

“Sure,” I said, reckless, foolish, drink-besotted, hurtling mindlessly toward some fateful collision. I sprang up from the blanket. We were standing inches apart. I put my arm around her shoulder and we kissed for the first time, dogs yapping and chords thumping at the periphery of my consciousness, my whole being consumed with pure urgent animal lust. “Be back in a minute,” she said, her voice soft as a touch, and I stood there, empty cup in hand, watching helplessly as she receded into the crowd.

I looked around me. The heifer bacchanal was in full swing, heads, shoulders, torsos and hips flailing in time to the music, feet shuffling and legs kicking, incisors tearing, molars champing, throats gulping — beef, beef, beef — as the smoke rose to the sky and abandoned shrieks cut through the steady pounding din of the drums. To the left of the dancers was the barbecue pit, which I would have to negotiate on my way to the beer booth, and beyond that the appalling dark entrance of the bar.

I began to maneuver my way through the crowd, thinking of Petra’s blue shorts and the couch at the summer camp, when someone set off a string of firecrackers and fifty hats sailed into the air accompanied by a chorus of yips and yahoos. Ducking hats and elbows, clutching the plastic cups in one hand and extending the other to forestall interference, I snaked through the mass of carnivorous bodies at the barbecue pit and was just closing in on my destination when a two-hundred-pound blonde in pigtails and a fringed Dale Evans outfit stepped in front of me and asked if I wanted to dance.

“Dance?” I repeated, stupefied. But before I could go into my hard-of-hearing-with-a-touch-of-brain-damage routine, she jerked my arm like a puppy’s leash, spun me around and propelled me toward the dance floor. This was no time for argument: I danced. She pressed me to her — breasts like armaments, big grinding hips — then made the mistake of releasing my hand as she fell into momentary rapture over the musical miracle of her own rhythmically heaving body, and I dodged behind a barefoot lumberjack with beard, belly and ratchetting beads, and clawed my way to the beer booth.

The bartender had his back to me, bending to crack a fresh keg. “Two beers,” I said. “When you get a chance.” I stole a look over my shoulder to see if my dancing partner had missed me, but there was no sign of her. I was safe. I would give the dance floor a wide berth on the way back, hand Petra her beer and then suggest that we go to my place — or rather her place. Yes, that’s what I’d do. We’d been here long enough, I’d taken foolish risks, and now it was time for my reward.

Absently, I studied the work-hardened hands of the bartender as he positioned the spigot over the cork, screwed the collar tight and rammed the plunger home. Somewhere behind me a raft of firecrackers snapped and stuttered. And then, in the half-conscious way we register minor changes in our environment, I saw that this bartender, with his sun-ravaged neck, graying hair and outsized ears, was not the good-natured cowboy of two and a half hours ago, but someone else altogether, someone who from this angle almost looked … familiar.

Before I could make the connection, Lloyd Sapers spun around, spigot in hand, and said, “Two beers coming up.” The beer was already hissing into the first cup, yellow as bile, when he glanced up and found himself staring into my stricken face. There was a moment of shocked recognition during which his eyes fell back into his head and his lower jaw dropped open to reveal teeth worn to nubs and a lump of shit-colored tobacco, and then his face lit with a sort of malicious joy. “Well, Christ-ass, if it isn’t Ernest Hemingway. Gettin’ a bit dry up there on the mountain, hey?”

My first impulse was to laugh in his face in an explosion of nerves, like the killer at the denouement of a Sherlock Holmes movie (Ha! You’ve caught me! Ha-Ha! Yes, yes: I did it! I killed her! Choked her with my own hands, I did. Ha! Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha! Ha!). Fortunately, I was able to stifle that impulse. What I did manage to do, after struggling to get a grip on myself, was force my face into the jocular it-wasn’t-me expression of a good ole boy caught in a minor but quintessentially manly transgression. “You know how it is,” I said, grinning sheepishly, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“Don’t I know it,” he roared and nearly choked on his own laughter. I watched as the level of beer rose in the second cup, already shifting my weight to turn and make my escape, when he leaned forward and said, “You didn’t bring that big fella with you, did you? The one that shoved me around?”

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said, dropping his voice from the usual roar. His straw hat was askew and he smelled as if he’d been dipped in used Kitty Litter. “I don’t like him,” he said confidentially, capping off the beer with a crown of foam. “The man just ain’t neighborly.”

I hooked two fingers over the lips of the plastic cups, preparatory to lifting them from the table and making my exit, but Sapers wouldn’t release them. Held fast, I could only mumble something to the effect that Gesh was sometimes hard to get along with.

“Ha!” Sapers bellowed. “Now that’s an understatement.” And then he snatched the beers from my grasp and swished them in the dust; “You got a couple of chewed-up cups there, friend — what’d you do, pick ’em up off the ground?”

“No, I—”

“Here,” he said, producing clean cups and clicking them down on the table, “I’ll fix you up with some fresh ones,” and I watched as he prolonged my agony by pumping up the keg and meticulously tipping each cup to accept a slow steady stream of headless beer. I was sweating. I closed my eyes a moment and watched a dance of red and green paremecia on the underside of my eyelids. “Here you go,” Sapers said, and pushed the two full beers toward me.

Could it be this easy? I reached for the beers, about to thank him and go, when he ducked his head slyly, spat out a stream of saliva and tobacco juice and said, “So I hear you boys been doin’ a little gardenin’ up there. …”

I stood stock-still, my hands arrested, like a man at a picnic who glances up from his sandwich to find a two-inch hornet circumnavigating his head. Sapers was regarding me steadily, his eyes keen and intent. I remembered that first morning in the cabin, the way he’d dropped the mask of the yokel for just an instant and the foreboding I’d felt. He was clever, he was dangerous, he bore us ill will. And I was half drunk. As nonchalantly as I could, I lifted one of the beers to my lips, took a swallow and said, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Marlon,” he said, blinking innocently, the hick again. “He says you got all these drums of water and hoses and—”

I cut him off. “Marlon?” Illumination came in a rush: the big lumbering half-wit had been spying on us, slipping through the woods like a cousin to the bear, fingering our hoses and sniffing our plants. “You mean he’s …?” I couldn’t quite frame the words.

Sapers looked apologetic. “Oh, listen, I hope you and your friends’ll understand — the boy’s a bit, you know,” he said, tapping a gnarled finger to the side of his head. “He don’t mean no harm.”

“But our place is private property — we’ve got signs up all over the place.” My voice was a squeal of outrage. “Vogelsang would hit the ceiling if he heard about this.”

Sapers spat again, then picked up my beer and took a long swallow. “Aw, come on,” he said, “it’s no big deal, is it? What have you got to hide?”

“Nothing,” I said, too quickly. “But it’s the principle. You see, Vogelsang’s afraid somebody’ll get hurt on the property and sue him — he’s got a real hang-up about it. And Gesh, you know how Gesh is.” I shrugged. “Me, I could care less. I mean, shit, we’ve got nothing to hide.”

Sapers was watching me like a predator, no hint of amusement in his face. “So what have you got in the ground over there anyways — sweet corn?”

What was he doing — playing games? Making me squirm? I didn’t know what to think — maybe I was having a paranoid episode and he knew nothing at all — but at least I had the presence of mind to play along. “What else?” I said, as if in epicurean contemplation of that succulent, many-kerneled farinaceous vegetable. “Nothing but cattle corn in the supermarket, right?”

Sapers was impassive, his face locked like a vault.

“Of course, we’re growing other stuff, too — for the exercise, you know? Beets, celery, cucumbers, succotash — you name it.”

Stroking his chin thoughtfully, Sapers shifted the wad of tobacco from his left cheek to his right. “The only reason I ask is because I been havin’ the devil of a time with the coons this year — for every ear they eat they spoil five. They hittin’ you pretty hard, too?”

“No,” I said. “I mean yes. Or we didn’t know it was coons. Something’s been getting into the garden, anyway — Phil thought it was bears.” I chortled at the absurdity of it, but the joke fell flat. Something made me glance to my right at that instant, and I saw to my alarm that I was flanked by the immensity of Marlon and the wiry whiskery spring-coiled figure of George Pete Turner.

Marlon was wearing a dirty white T-shirt maculated with barbecue sauce, in the tenuous grip of which the great naked ball of his belly hung like a wad of soggy newsprint. He clutched a two-quart plastic bottle of Safeway cola in one hand and held a red helium balloon — HEIFER HIJINKS, WILLITS, CA — in the other. When he saw that my attention was focused on him, his eyes rushed round the thick lenses of his wire-framed glasses and he giggled.

George Pete Turner glared at me out of red-flecked eyes, then took a hit from a pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad. The last time I’d seen him he’d punched me in the side of the head. I looked from him to Sapers and then back again. “They let just about any scum in here, don’t they?” George Pete observed, staring down at my shoes.

“Well,” I said, an easy little chuckle breaking up the mellifluous double ls (who was I to take offense, the whole thing just a harmless little joke, a wisecrack, wit, persiflage, that’s all). I followed this with “Heh-heh” as a sort of bridge, raised my hand in a quick farewell and ducked away, abandoning the beers.

It was at this point, nearly panicked now, running scared, that I found myself making eye contact with the big blonde in the Dale Evans outfit. Though I immediately glanced away, I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was making her way toward me through the crowd. I had nowhere to turn. Sapers behind me, the she-woman in front of me, the pit to my left and the dark portals of Shirelle’s to my right. If in such situations the hearts of heroes expand to enable them to flail their enemies into submission, tuck heroines under their arms and swing to safety via conveniently placed gymnasium ropes, then I benefited at that moment from a similarly expanding organ — that is, my bladder. All at once my body spoke to me with an urgency that was not to be denied. I took a deep breath and plunged toward the shadowy entrance of the bar and the rushing release of the men’s room that lay beyond it.

I was met by the roar of electric fans, a clamor of chaotic voices, and darkness. After the steady, harsh, omnipresent glare of the summer sun, the darkness here seemed absolute, impenetrable, the darkness of mushroom cellars, crypts, spelunkers’ dreams. I edged out of the doorway in the direction of the bar, feeling my way through the pillars of flesh and barking drunken voices until my eyes began to adjust. The place, I saw, was packed. People pressed up against the bar, stood in tight howling groups with cocktails clenched in their hands, sat six or eight to a table tearing at ribs and hoisting pitchers of margaritas. For some reason — temperature control? atmosphere? — the curtains were drawn and candles glimmered from the tables. I stood there a moment, tentative, my shoulders drawn in, a canny old quarterback scouting the defensive line. Then my bladder goaded me and I started across the room.

Unfortunately, a great bleary white-haired hulk of a man in denim jacket and string tie chose that moment to lurch back and deliver the punch line of a joke with a lusty guffaw and an emphatic stamp of his rattlesnake-hide boot. The emphatic stamp caught me across the bridge of my right foot as the jokester’s audience exploded in laughter. “Excuse me,” I murmured, backing off, when I felt a pressure on my arm and swung round to stare bewildered into Savoy’s foxy triangular little face. “Hi,” she said. “Long time no see.”

Something caught in my throat.

“Felix, right?” she said, treating me to a blinding, full-face smile. I felt like a prisoner of painted savages running the gauntlet over a trench of hot coals — reeling from one blow, I pitched face forward into the stinging slap of the next. I watched numbly as she fished a pack of cigarettes from a tiny sequined purse, shook one free and lit it.

“I was just going to the men’s room,” I said.

Savoy breathed smoke in my face. “So how do you like the party?” she said, ignoring me. The smile was fixed on her lips, as empty and artificial as the smile of a president’s wife or a dime-store mannequin, but effective all the same. I didn’t want to be within six miles of her, the pressure on my bladder was like a knife in the groin, I was in trouble, out of luck and I’d begun to feel queasy, and yet still that smile spoke to me of erotic delights unfolding like the petals of a flower. “You’ve got to admit,” she said, pulling the cigarette from her mouth to nudge me and emit a chummy little giggle, “the place is shit-for-sure livelier than usual.”

I had to admit it. But my stomach plunged like an elevator out of control and the ocean of beer I’d consumed was, according to the first law of gastrophysics, seeking an outlet. I belched.

This was hilarious. She clapped her hands and laughed aloud, as if I’d just delivered an epigram worthy of Oscar Wilde. “Far out,” she gasped, still laughing. “I know what you mean.” Then she gave me that beaming, wide-eyed, candid look and took my hand. “Listen,” she said, “I’m over here at the bar. Why don’t you come and join me for a minute so I can buy you a drink and introduce you to a few friends?”

Introduce me? This was the girl who had turned to me with the same smile, the same seductive eyes and insouciant breasts and announced, as if she were giving me an injection, that she had us cold. Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there. I pulled away. “No, no,” I said, “I’ve got to go, really,” knowing that she was poison, that she was out to trip me up, that her eyes were trepans and her smile a snare.

“Oh, come on,” she said, tugging my hand as insistently as the big blonde had. “One little drink.”

The flesh is weak, but the mind is weaker. I followed her.

We made our way through the crowd — men in wide-brimmed felt hats, women in print dresses clutching patent-leather purses — to the only unoccupied bar stool in the place. Two women — one middle-aged, the other about thirty — flanked the empty stool like sentinels. They smiled in unison as Savoy led me up to them.

What was going on here? I wondered vaguely, my brain numbed with love for Petra, lust for Savoy, heat, guilt, alcohol and the successive shocks of standing face to face with the handful of people in the world I most wanted to avoid. Why was Savoy, whom I barely knew, taking the trouble of introducing me to anyone? What was in it for her, for me? Was she just a friendly, ingenuous, lovely expansive teenager, or was she a conniving, hardened slut who wanted to lead me to destruction and make me betray my friends? For that matter, what was I doing here? Why wasn’t I in the men’s room, at Petra’s apartment, crouching under the bed at the summer camp?

“This is Felix,” Savoy was saying, “the guy I was telling you about?” Telling them about? The phrase sank talons in my flesh. I saw drinks on the bar — a glass of something clear — the hard foraging eyes of the older woman, the soft inquisitive gaze of the younger. Both women nodded, and I had the queer, lightheaded sensation that the room was moving.

Savoy was watching me. The two women were watching me. I felt like a lion or an elephant at the moment of plunging through the concealed bamboo to the pit below. “This,” Savoy said, indicating the older woman, “is Mrs. Jerpbak, and this,” nodding toward the younger, “is her daughter-in-law, Jeannie.”

At first the names didn’t register. I rarely picked up names on a first introduction, even at the best of times. Mrs. Humpback, Mrs. Runamok: what difference did it make? But then, as the elder woman leaned toward me and mouthed “So what do you do, Felix?” the plugged channels of my brain opened up and the full horror of what was happening came home to me: I was standing amicably in a public place and trading polite chitchat with the wife and mother of my deadliest enemy. Joe McCarthy would as soon have sat down to tea with Ethel Rosenberg and Mao Tse-tung. Even worse, Savoy was obviously intimate with them — no doubt they were old family friends who watched TV and shampooed their dogs together, attended church socials arm-in-arm, observed one another’s birthdays and shared a bottomless revulsion for dope growers, pickpockets and other specimens of urban depravity. This is the guy I was telling you about, Savoy had said. It was all up. We’d been fingered. Ten years, intoned the judge.

If I’d been able to pull myself together in the face of Sapers and George Pete Turner, now I broke down. Totally. Absolutely. Without hope or redemption. I leered down at this woman in the pink pants suit and cement hair (who reminded me disconcertingly of my own mother) and shrieked like a madman: “Ha-Ha! I did it! Yes, yes: I killed her!”

The elder Mrs. Jerpbak’s face shrank until it resembled something you might stumble across in a root cellar. She jerked back in her seat like a whiplash victim and clutched at the neck of her blouse. “Ha, ha, ha!” I crowed, turning on the younger Mrs. Jerpbak with the exultation of the Superman, beyond civility, beyond law, beyond reason. “Killed her with my own hands, I did. And by God, I enjoyed it!”

People began to turn their heads. Savoy dug her fingers into my arm and hissed in my face like some scaly thing prodded with a stick: “We were just talking about the rewards for turning in dope farmers, did you know that? Huh? Did you hear about that?” Her face was twisted and ugly, furious, vituperative, the face of an extortionist.

I didn’t feel well. I snatched the glass of clear liquid from the bar and downed it at a gulp. It was gin. I gave Savoy a sharp savage look — oh, the bitch, the bitch — folded my face up like a deck of cards (the floor heaving and swaying, faces melding in a blur as if glimpsed through the windows of a hurtling train), and then turned and vomited in the elder Mrs. Jerpbak’s lap.

Petra was sitting with Teddy and Sarah when I returned, beer-less, my bladder full and stomach empty, reeking of my own intestinal secrets and flailing through the crowd in a galloping, braying, headlong panic. “Felix,” Petra said, “where have you been?”

I could barely speak, locked in the paranoiac’s delirium, envisioning Jerpbak calling out the National Guard to avenge the assault on his mother, looking at Petra and seeing a horde of keypunchers and savings-and-loan men in fatigues, jaws grim with a spoiled weekend, their shiny new high-laced boots trampling through the scrub outside the cabin. Hounds bayed, helicopters hovered. We know you’re in there, shithead, Jerpbak bellowed through a megaphone, and then his voice faltered and broke: Ma, he bleated, Maaaaa!

“Felix?”

“Listen,” I said, panting, jerking my neck wildly as beefy faces lurched in and out of my field of vision, “listen, I’ve got to take off, I mean something’s come up, it’s, uh, well it’s my mother. Her, she—”

Petra was on her feet. “Are you all right?”

I could think of one thing only: slamming up the road to the summer camp as fast as the Toyota would take me and burying my head in the sleeping bag. “Can you, do you think you could get a ride back to town?”

Teddy and Sarah were standing now, too, their faces pinched with distrust: I was nobody, a stranger, an untouchable. I could have been a Hare Krishna begging change in the airport lobby. Petra’s jaw hardened. “Is this a joke?”

“No, listen, I’m sorry,” I said, already backing away.

“Felix.” There was impatience in her tone, exasperation. But there was something else, too: the hint of a plea.

“I’ll call,” I blurted — gutshot, terrified, stung by bestial urges and the frenzy of the doomed — as I turned to run for the car.

“Don’t bother,” Petra said.

I was running. No time to look back. I ran with all the force of the panic rising in my chest, ran in shock, ran as if the entire Jerpbak clan, Savoy, Sapers and George Pete Turner were chasing me with a pot of tar, ran till my lungs were heaving like a drowning man’s and the burning red door of the Toyota jerked back on its hinges and I plunged the key like a sword into the hot slot of the ignition.

I drove without thinking, fast and hard. Seventy-five, eighty, bad tires keening round the curves, my stomach churning. I hit the dirt road to the summer camp at fifty, slammed over scree, fallen limbs, the rock-hard hump that rose between the ruts like bread in a pan, and careened to a halt in a tangle of poison oak and stinging nettle. I shoved out of the car, fell to my knees and puked till I could feel my digestive tract strung out on a wire from throat to sphincter. My eyes watered, my head ached. I watched indifferently as a glossy black beetle crawled between my fingers and a party of ants discovered the sour eruption in their midst, then rose shakily, relieved the pressure on my bladder and forced myself back into the car. After grinding back and forth a dozen times, I managed to jerk the Toyota from the bushes and out onto the hardpan surface of the road.

It was then that I noticed the other car. An old MG, slung low, the grill like meshed teeth. It was parked on the Covelo road, almost directly across from the entrance to our driveway. I put the car in neutral and backed to the edge of the blacktop for a closer look. The car was in prime condition, newly painted, not a nick on it. There was no one in sight. Where was the driver? Had the car broken down, run out of gas? Or was this some backpacking Sierra Club freak ignoring our posted signs? I sat there a moment, studying the inert vehicle in the rearview mirror, then started up the road for the cabin.

Everything was as I’d left it — the tumbledown shack with its cloudy windows and peeling tarpaper, the gutted outbuildings, mounds of garbage. The Jeep sagged forward on its bad spring, the open hood testimony to my frustrated efforts to start it. It was six-thirty. The sun hung over the cabin as if stalled, a hushed expectant stillness in the air. Dowst wasn’t back yet.

I felt a hundred years old. My clothes were sweat-soaked, my mouth tasted of bile. I’d left the plantation for six hours and the wrath of the gods had fallen on my head. There was no doubt about it, I thought, trudging across the moribund field to the house, Savoy meant to blackmail us. And I’d have to tell them. Tell Phil and Gesh, my partners and fellow sufferers, my buddies. Tell Dowst. Tell Vogelsang. Tell them I’d gone back on my word, tell them I’d fucked up. I stepped up on the porch, scattering lizards, and the tiniest hope flared in my scored brain: Vogelsang. Maybe he could sound her out, buy her off, kidnap her and ship her to Bolivia in a crate of machine parts. Anything was possible. After all, he was used to working miracles — and he never lost. Never. Not to anyone.

The door pushed open with its usual whine of protest — bed, I was thinking, an hour’s sleep, that’s all I’ll need and then I can sort things out — when I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and turned to see a figure seated on the couch. It wasn’t Dowst, it wasn’t Vogelsang, it wasn’t Phil or Gesh or Aorta. I stood there frozen in the doorway, stupefied, blinking at the gloom. I saw ankle boots, skinny tie, short hair brushed straight up and back.

“Hello, Felix,” Jones said.

Chapter 8

I heard the minutest sounds: the drip of the bathroom faucet, the rattle of a fly trapped against the windowpane. Tap-tap, tap. The fly threw the husk of its body against the glass — blindly, uselessly — until the rasp of those cellophane wings became unbearable. For an instant, as if in a dream, the objects of the room lost definition (shadows and shapes, shapes and shadows) and then materialized again. I saw a bag of garbage spilled beneath the stove, cobwebs, dirt, a deck of worn cards on the kitchen table, I saw Jones. The moment was timeless, eternal. Tap-tap, tap. Jones made no move to rise from the couch. Finally, the seconds swelling like blisters, he attempted a smile, the sort of smile one ten-year-old gives another before shoving him over the back of a crouching conspirator. “Don’t you remember me?” he said.

My first thought was to close the door, trap him so he couldn’t escape. But then what? Strangle him with his tie? Get him in a headlock and wait for reinforcements? Jones. The wonder of it, the perfidy, the wicked baffling collusion of chance and circumstance: he’d known all along. I slammed the door with a savagery that shook the house.

“No need to get upset, brother,” Jones said, dragging on his cigarette. “I just came to talk business, that’s all.”

I measured the room in six long strides and stood over him, hands clenched at my sides. “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. My voice was strained, distant, as harsh and punchy as a drum-roll echoing across an open field.

Jones didn’t flinch. He just looked up at me, cool as an assassin, arms folded and jaw set. I don’t give a shit, his eyes said. About you, the social contract, hard work, sweat, toil, aspiration. … I want, they said.

I wanted, too. I wanted tranquillity, soothing pleasures in every part, an end to fear, madness and the frantic driven wide-eyed rush of the pursued, I wanted my friends to make money and the summer camp to succeed. And though I hadn’t struck anyone in anger since I was thirteen and a kid named Sammy Wolfson told me to get my dirty ass out of his mother’s begonias, I wanted to strike Jones. Right then. Swiftly, savagely, with power and immediacy and all the hammering force of righteousness. I wanted to blast him, flatten him, cripple him, concentrate all my rage and bile in one annihilating, bone-crushing blow and lay him to waste. I’d had it. I looked at Jones and knew I could kill.

If he could read my thoughts, Jones gave no indication of it. He crossed his legs as casually as if he were lunching at the finks’ club, and then flicked the ash from his cigarette. On the floor. “All’s I want is ten thou.”

“Get out!” I roared. I was trembling.

Jones uncoiled himself and cautiously rose from the couch. We were standing two feet apart. “You want to fight?” he said. “I’ll fight you, motherfucker.”

This was it, the project gone to pot, the wolf at the door, violence and criminality. “Get out,” I repeated, senselessly, and my voice dropped with resignation: there were no more words.

“Hit me, man,” Jones said, backing off a pace. “Go on. But I’ll walk straight into the Willits police station and collect a thousand bucks for turning you guys in. You like that?”

I didn’t like anything. I didn’t care. I cocked my fist.

Just then, salvator mundi, there was the sound of a car in the field outside, and Dowst’s van eased into view beyond the window. We watched silently as the van jerked to a halt in a maelstrom of dust and Dowst emerged in shorts and sandals, looking as if he were on his way to a croquet party. Jones exhaled a cloud of smoke and eased himself down on the arm of the couch. “The other partner, huh?” he sneered. “Let’s let him in on this, too.”

Dowst came through the door with a sack of Santa Rosa plums, two bags of ice and a big-toothed companionable grin. When he spotted Jones slouching there against the arm of the couch like a delinquent outside the principal’s office, he stopped dead a moment, as if afraid he’d entered the wrong house, then continued on in and set his burden down on the kitchen counter. His face had flared briefly — with surprise, passion, outrage — and then fallen in on itself like a white dwarf. Now he stood there at the counter, his mouth puckered in a lower-case o, struggling for some reason to replicate the call of a familiar woodland bird.

“Jones,” I said.

“Jones?”

“The famous dope farmer,” I said. Jones grinned. “He’s here to blackmail us.”

“All’s I want is ten thou,” Jones said, replaying a tape.

I watched comprehension filter into Dowst’s face, and then I watched him get angry (it began with his ears, which flushed the color of spiracha chilis, as if they’d been tweaked, and then seeped into his face, settling in a tight intransigent line across his lips). “We’re busy here,” he said. “We’ve got no time for leeches. As Dowst waxed, I waned. I found that my own anger had dissipated, choked on itself like the mythical beast that swallows its own tail. All I felt now was despair.

Jones ground out his cigarette on the arm of the couch and then adjusted the knot of his tie. “You’re busy,” he mocked. “Well, so am I. So’s the sheriff. He’s busy looking for assholes like you.”

“We know about you,” Dowst said. He was puffed up with self-righteousness now, the Yalie remonstrating over a trick question on a botany quiz. “You were busted last summer.”

Jones shrugged. “Then they’ll know my information is reliable, right?” He pushed himself up from the chair arm and moved past me toward the door. “Look,” he said, pausing at the doorway and glancing from me to Dowst, “I’m not asking, I’m telling you. Ten thousand bucks. Cash. You don’t give it to me, I’ll have a talk with the sheriff.”

The color had gone out of Dowst’s face as the gravity of the situation hit home: we were powerless. We could bait, bluster and threaten all day, we could coddle and cajole, appeal to Jones’s better nature and then pin him down and work over his ribs and groin till he couldn’t stand, but he had us. Short of murder, there was nothing we could do to stop him. Dowst looked sorrowful, penitent, deeply hurt and appalled; he looked as if he’d been punched in the wallet. “But we haven’t got that kind of money,” he said. “It’s all wrapped up in the plants.”

“Monday. Noon.”

“You know that,” I said. He was giving us two days. “You of all people …”

Jones turned to me with a look of malice that made me want to wring my hands, tear out my hair and out-howl the damned in the lake of fire. “Ask Vogelsang,” he said, and the name sounded natural on his lips, the thought sensible and apposite, until I realized that this was Jones speaking, a stranger, someone who couldn’t possibly have known who was behind us … unless—picture mountains toppling into the sea, great slabs of granite shearing off and hammering the pitching waters, and you’ll have an idea of how this insight was to hit me—unless Vogelsang had been lying to us all along, unless Jones had been his man. Dowst must have had the same thought. Slap. Crash. Thud. His mouth gaped and his hands fluttered at his sides as if he’d gone into neuromuscular collapse.

The door was open. Jones was framed in the glare from the dead yellow field and the dead yellow hills beyond. His expression was gloating, triumphant — he could have been a grand master maneuvering his bitterest rival into checkmate. I watched in a daze as he lifted his index finger in hip valediction. “Ciao,” he said, and the door pulled shut.

I was sunk uneasily in the easy chair, simultaneously studying Vogelsang’s back, tapping my foot to a manic nine/eight beat and devouring corn chips with a compulsion that verged on frenzy. Something was about to happen, something final and irrevocable, but I didn’t know what. Vogelsang’s back (the dapple of brown and green in the jumpsuit, the undershirt of muscle rippling and contracting as he gestured with his hands and upper body, the hard black excrescence of the.44 at his side) was the center in a storm of uncertainty, a cipher, something to hold on to. I studied it as the setting sun smeared the windows with blood.

Vogelsang was talking, talking nonstop, and we were in the midst of a crisis. The crisis. The crisis of crises. At long last, after all the scarifying feints and shuffles, after all the alarms in the night, our troubles had erupted and the hour of our sorrow was at hand. Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is perished.

Oh, yes.

All the principals were gathered, Dowst in his kerchief and I in my cap, Gesh, Phil, Aorta. Dowst was sitting across from Vogelsang at the kitchen table, an expression of censure and distaste ironed into his stern Yankee features. Aorta hunched beside Vogelsang in an imitation-leopardskin jacket, examining her nails with a bowed head, and — this got my heart pounding — looking scared. Propped up against the stove, his face a mask of rage — curled lip, Tatar cheekbones, bristling beard — Gesh could have been an advance man for Genghis Khan. His eyes were lidded with exhaustion and the torpor of methaqualone abuse, and the sleeves of his shirt had been cut away to reveal the cables in his arms. Phil was gone, a mere ghost of himself, stretched out on the couch behind me like a narcoleptic. He and Gesh had rolled into Tahoe at about the time I’d stepped into Petra’s shop, and they’d worked diligently at obliterating all thought of the summer camp until Dowst’s hysterical summons reached them at three-thirty the following morning. Then they climbed back into the pickup and watched the broken yellow line eat up the road.

My hand went to the bag of chips, then to my mouth, then back to the bag: hand, bag, mouth, hand, bag, mouth. Phil’s snores were like stones dropped on a polished surface. Vogelsang’s voice rattled on. Immanent, inescapable, like beat of blood and thump of heart, the little creatures of house and wood saturated the auditory spectrum with clicks, rattles, hisses and grunts. Twenty-four hours had passed since I’d walked into the house and found Jones on the couch.

“All I know about Jones is what Strozier told me. He must have been guerrilla farming up here — Strozier didn’t even know it himself till he came up from the city one day and saw the garbage the idiot left behind.” Psssst, psssst. Vogelsang freshened his breath. “If Jones named me he probably looked up the deed to the property and took an educated guess.”

My hand paused at the bag’s aperture, my foot stopped drumming. I’d created half this crisis — Savoy was all my own doing — and I didn’t have a right even to open my mouth at this point. But I surprised myself. “Vogelsang,” I said. “You’re lying.”

At first, the secret of Savoy had clung to me like a mussel to a rock, tenacious, immovable, held fast despite the crash of the waves and the suck of the tide. Reeling from the confrontation with Jones and the gallery of horrors to which I’d been subjected at Shirelle’s, I was too deep in shock even to think about my weakness, treachery and guilt, let alone confess them. For a while I even toyed with the idea of keeping the whole thing to myself. Forever. If we were busted, the fink-of-choice was Jones. Savoy? Never heard of her. I sank low in that moment, as low as I’ve ever sunk, but my better self won out. There was a moral imperative here: I was a sentry and the barbarians were creeping up on us, dirks clenched between their teeth and blood in their eyes, and it was up to me to sound the alarm. I’d already left the gate open. Could I stand by and see my mates butchered in their bunks?

Still, confession hadn’t come easy. Just after Jones had made his exit, Dowst and I had dodged frantically round the room for half an hour or so, ritually weeping, wailing and gnashing our teeth, before it occurred to Dowst that he should (a) remove himself as quickly as possible from the scene of the crime, and (b) use the phoning of the absent partners as a pretext for that removal. He was gone for hours. The night revolved round my guilt. The house was dark, and I lay in my bed like a sacrificial victim on the block, the jetliners at thirty thousand feet screaming in my ears, each rustle of leaf or sigh of branch the dread footfall of the high priest. And then, at the stroke of some dark, forlorn hour, there came the closing rumble of a vehicle making its way up the hill. Dowst? Jerpbak? G. P. Turner and a mob of vigilantes? I didn’t wait to find out. My legs exploded beneath me and I was out the door in a bound, across the field and into the woods by the time Dowst’s headlights illuminated the trees at the far end of the front lot. It was four a.m. I hadn’t slept an instant. I huddled there in the crushed leaves, spiderwebs and squirrel shit, crying out for absolution, ready to crawl on my hands and knees up the thousand steps of the temple, ready to bare my soul and take my pricks and kicks.

I told Dowst. (I don’t remember how I broached the subject. Lamely, I’m sure. “Uh, Boyd, uh, guess what? You want to hear something funny?”) Then, when they arrived at noon — burned out, hung over, and terminally wired — I told Phil and Gesh. Finally, when Vogelsang pulled in at five in the afternoon, I choked back my swollen tongue, hung my head and told him, too. He listened stoically, lines ironed into his cheeks. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said when I’d finished. His tone of voice was a marvel — distant, superior, lugubrious and sarcastic to the point of flagellation — a tone precisely calculated to induce writhings of guilt in its auditor. “First the thing with the CHP, and now this. You’re out of control, Felix.” He was the crestfallen coach and I the star player caught with a bag of Dexamyls in his locker. “I thought you were the rock of this project, someone I could trust. That’s why Boyd and I came to you first.” Dowst was irate. He insisted that I forfeit my share and get off the property posthaste. Gesh raged, Phil clucked his tongue. I was stupid, they said, a fool. Pussy-crazed. I’d let them down. I was a first-class schmuck, an airhead, an oaf and a poltroon. They said all of this and more, my co-sufferers and fellow peons (every time I glanced at Gesh he came up with a new insult), but they stood by me.

We’d waited for Vogelsang through the endless afternoon, waited as a beleaguered and vastly outnumbered army waits for reinforcements, for the order to withdraw, for the old campaigner who can turn defeat into victory. He’d marched in with a stiff back, strung as tightly as any of us, jumping at the slightest sound, but trying his best to maintain. My confession had given him a chance to take the offensive, but when we’d exhausted that ground and turned back to Jones, he’d begun filibustering. He was selling and we weren’t buying. Confusion, panic and the withering fire of recrimination assailed us, we beat our breasts, shrieked in one another’s faces. Accusations flew, tempers flared. We cursed one another, raged and receded, plotted wildly, imagined untold horrors and parceled out blame.

The biggest parcel was mine. I was blameworthy in everyone’s eyes, my own included. I was incontinent, unreliable, about as trustworthy as a shaggy-legged satyr at a Girl Scout jamboree. Dowst was culpable, as far as Phil, Gesh and I were concerned, for having failed to come up with sufficient seedlings and to plan for a host of contingencies — from root rot to rodents to the birth of Jerpbak — but he was absolved from blame in the current crisis. Vogelsang was unanimously guilty — of duplicity and un-derhandedness, of failing to shield us from harsh eventuality, of having walked into my living room on that rainy winter’s night. There were two innocents among us. Oh, they could have dug more holes or killed more rats, but at this point they were nothing more than aggrieved victims.

Now, the sun dipping behind the ridge and bringing us that much closer to the hour Jones had named, one of those aggrieved innocents spoke up. “Felix says you’re lying, Herb,” Gesh growled, his voice the ominous rumble of some cave-dwelling thing, some bear or wolverine roused from hibernation.

The filibuster had stopped cold. Vogelsang looked tense, shifty, he looked like a perjurer tripped up on the witness stand, he looked like a liar. “I’m not,” he said. “Trust me.” And then he was off again, as if afraid to stop talking, reassuring us, marshalling arguments against our quitting, admitting that things had come to a dangerous pass through my irresponsibility and other factors beyond his control, but reminding us that nothing had happened yet and insisting that he would do his fixer’s best to right the cart. Or something like that. I remember only that he used the orator’s stratagem of exaggerating the adversary’s guilt and opposing it to his own innocence, and that he finished by assuring us that he would ferret out Jones and Savoy and see what he could do. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of them.”

Take care of them? I thought. What was he going to do— buy them off? Cut out their tongues? Run them down in his Saab? Take care of them. He’d promised to take care of us, too.

“Jones,” Gesh repeated. The name was a summons, a challenge, a kick in the face. He was leaning forward now, his fists clenched, his eyes swollen till they looked like cueballs. “You’re lying, Herb. You’re shit-faced with it.”

“Christ, stop bickering,” Dowst snapped, leaping up from the table. “The police could be at the door any minute. I say we harvest what we can and get out now.”

I could see it coming, see it in the way Gesh shifted his weight forward and swung away from the stove, and though I hurled myself out of the armchair, I was half an instant too late. There was a thud as Dowst hit the wall, a muted cry from Aorta and then the wet brutal slap, as of a canoe paddle brought down on the surface of a still lake, as Gesh caught Vogelsang across the cheekbone with six months of rage and frustration. It was a lurching, graceless blow, and Gesh staggered forward under his own momentum, fist, arm, shoulder and chest describing a single arc that brought him and Vogelsang to the floor in a deluge of flesh. The table leapt, the chair splintered. Coffee mugs skipped across the linoleum. Vogelsang was on his back, hugging Gesh in a lover’s embrace, cords standing out in his neck, jaw clamped, eyes feral and frightening. Gesh fought for purchase. “Motherfucker,” he spat, over and over, as if it were a battle cry.

They were scraping across the floor, hugging each other, the shuffle of hands and feet like a chorus of sweeping brooms. Gesh was breathing hard, grunting, cursing; Vogelsang grappled in silence. By now Dowst had recovered from his initial shock and was leaning over the combatants like a referee. “Knock it off!” he shouted, as if it could have the slightest effect. “Come on, break it up!” Feet churned over the floor, the end table went down. Aorta had backed up against the far wall, Phil looked up groggily from the couch. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there, trembling, caught up in the killing violence, watching Gesh hammer at Vogelsang and wanting both to wade in and separate them and to let it go on. Vogelsang was down. The untouchable, the serene, chief god of his own pantheon and victor of every contest he’d ever entered. He was down, and something moved in me with every blow.

It’s hard to say exactly how it happened. Gesh was on his knees, swinging mechanically, Vogelsang struggling to ward off the blows and Dowst leaning forward clumsily to snatch at Gesh’s collar like a teacher in the schoolyard. Then suddenly Vogelsang was free and scrambling to his feet while Dowst hit the wall again and Gesh rose from the floor like a wounded bear. “Gesh!” I shouted, and I understood in that instant that I was cheering him on, goading him, backing him, calling out his name in partisanship and affirmation as the ranks of hometown fans call out the single name of the champion stepping up to bat. For them. For us. Gesh moved forward, huge, the street fighter, the brawler, blood on his knuckles.

I glanced at Vogelsang. His face showed nothing. His right eye was swollen and there was a thread of blood at the corner of his mouth. The.44, swift death, steel in an arena of flesh, clung to his hip. He ignored it. Instead, he cocked his open hands in the kung fu pyramid and stepped forward.

“No!” I shouted.

“Vogelsang!” Dowst called.

It was so quick. So quick I barely saw it. Gesh swung, Vogelsang parried the blow and caught him twice in the throat with the flat of his hand and then struck him in the groin with an exploding foot. As Gesh pitched forward, Vogelsang’s knee went to the small of his back and I could hear the chiropractor’s crack as he jerked Gesh’s head back in the Montagnard death grip. And then, before I could realize what was happening, Phil was up off the couch with the misaligned.22 in his hand and I was flinging up my elbow to deflect his aim — too far, this had gone too far — when we all stopped dead at the sound of Aorta’s voice.

She hadn’t screamed — no, it was far more chilling than that. “Oh, my God,” she said, and it cut like a knife to the core of everything we were — stark, animal, squeal of bushpig, howl of monkey — and we understood somehow that the words had no reference to the silly morality play we were enacting. We looked up — all of us, even Vogelsang, even Gesh. Looked up and saw that there was a face in the kitchen window, framed against the darkening sky. Round and huge, moonlike, a face, watching us.